Drinking While Dieting

Most diets recommend avoiding caffeinated beverages or cutting back on them because caffeine stimulates both appetite and insulin production. Generally, cutting back on caffeine isn’t a bad thing. But something that’s been even more on my mind is sweetened beverages.

I find that I don’t drink a lot of plain water, nor do a lot of people. If it’s not soda, it’s tea, or coffee, or iced tea, or lemonade, or a flavor packet mixed in with plain water, or “infused” water containing a hint of flavor via essential oils from citrus or herbs. And that’s just the various stuff I’ve been known to drink. When we expand it out to the general market, there’s caffeinated water, water with vitamins, water with fiber… you name it.

We have a passion in America, and possibly worldwide, to have our beverages deliver something more than mere water. We need flavor. And this is one place where savory just isn’t grabbing a foothold. We’re not seeing ads for Red Bullion, no chicken broth that gives you wings, no caffeinated consomme. If we’re doing more than a hint of mint or some fruit essence, we’re sweetening it.

Most sugared sodas and sports drinks deliver 1-2 grams of carbs per ounce. Energy drinks and juices deliver more. The Newman’s Own grape juice I get at Costco delivers 5 grams of carbs per ounce. Two cups of that a day and you drinking down more sugar than in a candy bar. A half cup of that grape juice and you’ve had all the carbs for a day on the “induction phase” of Atkins.

But are artificial sweeteners much better? There are a lot of agenda promoters on the web going back and forth on the topic. Each side in the debate makes their claims and debunks the other’s. If you read everything and don’t have a degree in biochemistry to sort it all out, it’s easy to believe that either every artificial sweetener you can get your hands on is the greatest invention since opposable thumbs or that the entire sweetener industry is led by maniacal greedy bastards who want nothing more than to kill you and your children.

I’ll trust the Mayo Clinic, which says they’re generally safe, but to use them in moderation. They also make reference to this study that demonstrated artificial sweeteners confusing the satiation and metabolic mechanisms in rats, though some opponents of the study say that it’s a big leap to translate that into humans.

Is it? One of the biggest health issues caused when Snackwell fat-free cookies were introduced was people pigging out on Snackwells because they mistook “fat-free” for “calorie-free”. While the issue in rats may be on a more basic level, some people see “fat-free” or “sugar-free” labels as meaning “eat all you want” and they gorge themselves.

Also some sweeteners, particularly sugar alcohols which are used in “low carb” and “sugar free” products, have known health issues when you consume too much. Basically, too much of sugar substitutes like these will act like a laxative. I learned this the hard way from scarfing down a bag of sugar-free jelly beans. The same goes for sugar free gum sweetened with sugar alcohols like Xylitol. There have been case studies where people who chewed too much sugarless gum got chronic diarrhea.

Yet I digress. Caffeinated, flavored, and sweetened beverages. How much should I have, which sweeteners are safe, etc?

I’ve decided that I’m going to do what I call “half and half and half.” That means I’m going to drink at least 1 liter of plain water a day. Aside from that, I can have four cups of flavored beverages, two of which can be caffeinated diet cola, coffee, or caffeinated tea, two of which can be decaf tea or other form of non-caffeinated sugarless soft drink.

But when it comes to sweeteners…

• Despite our benificent government letting them market Splenda as “zero calorie”, each packet of Splenda contains 3.3 calories from the dextrose and maltodextrin used to bulk it up and mask its aftertaste, meaning that each packet of Splenda is close to one carb gram. Since I like to sweeten my tea with 2-3 packets of Splenda, that could be half my daily dose of carbs right there if I used it 4 times a day. I won’t go nuts if there’s sucralose in my diet soda, but I’ve got to be careful with Splenda.
• Erythritol is getting a lot of good press, but it’s less sweet than table sugar and I find I use 3-4 teaspoons of table sugar to sweeten my tea, sometimes more. So even though it’s .2 kilocals per gram, I might use 20-25 grams in a single drink. Instead of straight erythritol, I’m considering trying Truvia, which mixes stevia extract and erythritol. According to the Truvia web site, I should be able to pick up Truvia at my local Safeway.
• Aspartame or Nutrasweet has been around forever and lots of natural foods people hate it. Even Atkins wasn’t wild about it and tried to get his patients to cut it out in favor of saccharin (yup, it’s not as bad for you as they used to think it was) or limited quantities of Splenda. I’m not worried about it in low concentrations within diet colas, but I’m not a huge fan of sweetening beverages with it.
• For the longest time, the FDA prohibited marketing stevia as a sweetener, so it had to be marketed as a dietary supplement. That changed late last year and there are a few stevia-based sweeteners already on supermarket shelves. There’s Truvia, noted above, which is from Cargill, and there’s “Stevia Extract in the Raw” (which looks like “Stevia in the Raw” on the packaging because the word “extract” is small) which is from Cumberland, the producers of Sugar in the Raw. Both products claim to have gotten past the licorice aftertaste that is a complaint among people who don’t like stevia.

I’m liking Stevia on principle, but I have to try it, so I’m going to do a “Stevia Shoot Out” and taste test a couple of the new stevia sweeteners very soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Diet Strategy, The Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.