July 12, 2012
Years ago, before I made huge dietary changes for the sake of our health, we got lured into a product tasting at Costco that changed my life. And not for the better. This overly happy woman was serving samples of flavored, calorie-free “sport water” and my husband and I liked the taste and bought an entire flat of the stuff. Every day, we’d drink that pinkish drink and would do so with no guilt because, hey, it’s ZERO CALORIES. I’d long given up diet soda because of my concern about aspartame, but for some strange reason, I didn’t seem to notice the sucralose at the top of the ingredient list. After maybe a month, I started to notice increased anxiety, more headaches (even migraines), moodiness, restlessness and lousy sleep. I asked Brian if he noticed any changes and he also said he’d been getting headaches and not sleeping well. It took us some time before we remembered the new addition to our daily routine: those darn flavored waters from Costco.
I grabbed a bottle from the package and headed upstairs to investigate the ingredients. Sucralose (also known by the cutesy, innocent-sounding Splenda) was the first thing I researched and imagine my surprise when I discovered post after detailed post about the perils of ingesting that artificial sweetener. The symptoms listed by one nurse-author were precisely aligned with our own. I promptly scooped up the box of those waters, emptied them in the sink and tossed the bottles in the recycling bin. We vowed right then and there to never touch that stuff again – and we largely kept that promise, until recently.
Brian’s a gym rat who enjoys looking like a human Hulk. He came home with a huge container of chocolate-flavored protein powder and I didn’t even give it a second thought as he scooped the innocent-looking crap into the blender and mixed it with almond milk twice a day. He did this for close to three months – until he developed insomnia and obvious mood changes that neither of us could ignore. He became edgy (not with me, but I pitied the fool who cut him off in traffic or anyone else who looked at him sideways). He also became somewhat ‘flat.’ Not his usual comical, level and joyful self. It seemed an awful lot like mild depression, but who was I to expect him to be UP all the time? He finally admitted he hadn’t felt himself for some time and didn’t really know why or how to put his finger on it. I chalked it up to stress at work or the regular ups and downs of adulthood, but that didn’t really seem to fit. He hit the gym harder and kept on with those stupid protein shakes…and he progressively worsened.
One day, it hit me. I stood up from my computer and headed downstairs to pluck the protein drink from the pantry. Imagine my horror when I saw sucralose as a top ingredient! How could we have not paid attention to that? That day, we trashed that mix and he stopped cold turkey. I found him an all-organic pea protein mix with no artificial sweeteners…and we waited to see if there was any improvement. The headaches stopped after just one week, thankfully, but it took much longer (over a month) before his moodiness, flatness and sleeplessness corrected. It was very obvious to us both that the sucralose (Splenda) was to blame. We were relieved, but angry that we hadn’t noticed sooner. I’m no scientist, so I can’t speak about the dangers of sucralose from a scientific standpoint, but as consumers who, well, consumed the stuff with regularity, we can attest that it’s definitely not good for OUR bodies. If you’re an artificial sweetener junkie, I’d encourage you to research its ingredients thoroughly and consider switching to honey or plain cane sugar. In a pinch, even packets of table sugar are far better than the chemical-laden crystals in those little, harmless-looking pastel packets.
