Stuff You Should Know - Are Artificial Sweeteners Really Bad For You?

Episode Date: January 17, 2017

Artificial sweeteners have gotten a bad rap in the press for as long as they’ve been in use. But is it just the result of a fear of science or do artificial sweeteners cause real harm? A mounting body of studies is starting to paint a pretty grim picture. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry, the three musketeers together again

after so long, so many weeks of holidays and time off and rest and relaxation back at it again. Yes. Which makes this Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Hard to come back for you? No, no, I think it was just long enough and everything was just satisfying enough that I'm ready.

I'm glad to be back. Yeah, you're one of those weirdos. It's like, I need to work. Right, exactly, like my skin falls off. I've always said I would be a great lottery winner. Oh, yeah, or retiree? Yeah, lottery winner's better. I guess it's the same thing.

It's a retiree that doesn't have to sweat it. Right, exactly, which is nice, man. I just should tell people that we were discussing with Jerry the word dulcet, as far as your voice. Yes. Dulcet tones, he didn't know the definition, I looked it up.

Oh, oh, yes. I said sweet and soothing, but then in parentheses, this is often used ironically. I don't know what that is. It's a back end of compliment, I guess. Jerry, were you using it ironically? She, actually, she didn't even nod. She's just sort of moving her face around.

Her skin falls off too when she doesn't work. That's weird, people are weird. So sweet and nougaty is what you said? No, that's almond joys. Oh, that's right. No, Mars bars. No, Mars bars. Almond joys, coconut.

Sweet and soothing. Okay, I'll take that. I still prefer Muppety Tenor, it's the greatest of all time. It's very eye-opening for me. Oh, that was in an article about us. Muppety Tenor. Good stuff. So Chuck.

Yes. I know that you're a health conscious dude, at the very least, you're conscious of healthiness. Yeah, exactly. Right? I am too. And for a very long time, I made the switch and one of the things that I learned was

that one of the easiest ways you can lose weight very quickly is to just cut sodas out of your diet. Yeah, see, my problem is I don't even drink sodas. Right, so there's a whole step right there. Yeah. That's removed from you. It's fine. I mean, that's good, but in a way.

Right, but I mean, there's just no low-hanging fruit as it were. Right. As far as using corporate BuzzFeed goes. Unless you count gallons of booze. That's not a low-hanging, my friend. That's the top of the tree. That's last.

Top shelf. So when you stop drinking soda, you really do it. The pounds just fall off. It's insane, but you still want soda, right? I mean, it's like the craving's still there. And the soda industry knew this and they said, hey, we don't want to lose a bunch of revenue. Let's start making diet sodas.

Right. And apparently originally they made them almost exclusively for people with diabetes around the post World War II era. Yeah. You could find diet sodas with basically an inscription or something like that. Like it was inscribed on every hand. It would say something like for people who must watch

their sugar allotment or something like that, right? Yeah. And then as the soda industry was like, oh, wait, wait, we can really make weight loss an issue here and help promote weight loss by saying for people who wish to watch their sugar intake. Right? And just that little tiny switch changed everything

and the diet soda industry was born. Just a passive aggressive nudge in the right direction. Pretty much like, hey, don't you think you should be watching your sugar intake chubs? Yeah. You know, that's what's between the lines. So we've got these awesome diet sodas that are sweetened with artificial sweeteners.

But of course, there's nothing can possibly just be just good or just great because apparently we're starting to learn huge massive problems with artificial sweeteners as well. Problems so much that they may be worse than sugar, it turns out in a lot of cases. Yeah, I mean, when have we found and replaced something natural with something synthetic

and have it be nothing but like a win-win? I mean, I'm sure there's something, but it seems like there's always some kind of downside. I guess maybe like a robotic arm. Just better than a real arm. It depends on the arm that it replaces. It could be. So you're saving up for your robotic arm transplant?

Sure. All right. I'm tired of being weak on my right side. So you can crush those Coke Zero cans. Exactly. With more bigger. Oh, well, I'm not drinking anything any longer. After researching this, I'm like, yep,

I'm done with diet soda altogether. Oh, whoa. Really? Oh, yeah. Wow. Like through. Not a, this isn't a phase or anything like that. I'm sure over the course of my life,

I will have like a giant Coke Zero at a movie or something like that. But I'm generally just totally done with diet soda. What are you going to constantly be drinking then? Well, to be honest, I'd already kind of started. I was drinking like mineral water a lot more. OK. And I found like, once you just kind of switch over

the water, which used to just be disgusting, is actually kind of refreshing. Like just regular old like, like filtered water with ice. That's so funny because, you know, my history has always been heavy on the water. Sure. I know, like you're totally ahead of the game, it turns out. Well, by accident, but I just, I've always loved the water.

That's just how your taste is always run? Well, and I was just raised on it. You know, I've said it before, like milk and water, just didn't have a lot of sodas in the house and it just never really grabbed hold of me in that way, you know. Right. But mixing milk and water.

Oh, that's good. Yeah, it is. Then you have fat free milk. Yeah, pretty much. At least thin milk. No, drink whole milk. I'm all about it. So I'm off of the diet sodas forever.

Wow, well, that's good for you. It is good, but if I want to brush my teeth or use mouthwash. Use diet soda. Or take certain vitamins or something like that, I'm still running the risk of encountering artificial sweeteners because they're everywhere now. Yeah, well, let's back up a bit then. That was a nice old school intro, by the way.

Thank you. That's what you get after you take a nice Christmas break. You've been rehearsing that one? For weeks, yeah. You woke up Christmas morning and you means just like shut up. I'm like, no, I've got to practice. All right, well, we're talking about artificial sweeteners,

but what we're really talking about at its essence is sweet, the sensation of sweetness. And if you go back and listen to our, I think, pretty good episode on taste from many years ago, we break it down pretty well as far as the receptors on our tongue. So we don't really need to re-hatch that, but. Did you go back and listen to it?

Does it really hold up? Yeah, it's not bad for an older one. I mean, we get to the point, there's not as much shenanigans. So a lot of people prefer those. Yeah, we've added a lot of filler over the years. It's OK. But the level of sweetness that we taste, it's going to depend, there are those receptors on our tongue.

And they interact with those molecules and they have to fit, the shape has to fit. It's that weird thing that nobody really knows is going on on their tongue, that strange interaction is happening. Yeah, I remember from the taste episode, like one of the theories is that the whole thing is happening on the quantum level.

Wow, see. If I remember correctly. Yeah. So how much sweetness you're going to taste, the level of sweet is going to depend on your own receptors and how they're binding to that sweet sensation. So these artificial sweeteners, what they do is they found a way to elicit that same response

as we get from sugar. And basically, that's it. Some of them are, I mean, obviously, they're generally a lower calorie version of sugar, although we'll get to some that aren't later. And the reasons for that is some of them, they're all different. But some of them are so sweet, like hundreds and even thousands of times sweeter than sugar, that they just

need to use tiny, tiny bits of it. So it's basically no calorie. Other times, we don't even synthesize and absorb it and metabolize it. So that makes it no calorie. Yeah, you get the taste, but then it just comes out of your pee or your poop. Yeah.

Yeah, but so no calories. Exactly. I thought that was pretty interesting, because I'd never really stopped and thought about why those things are no or low calories. Yeah, me neither. Makes perfect sense. Yeah, the idea that something is so sweet,

you need to use so little of it that you subvert the calorie system, the calorie system. It's like, well, you can't even count that low. Yeah. That many decimal places beneath one calorie. And the weird thing is, to me, is when you look at the histories of some of these artificial sweeteners, and it's a little scary,

is that a lot of them were discovered by accident from these dumb scientists who are like trying to discover something else or work on something else, and they're like, oh, let me lick my finger and get a piece of paper, or let me smoke a cigarette and not wash my hands. And they're like, oh, my hands taste sweet. Yeah.

I mean, and it really, it drives home two things, that chemists aren't really fixed on their survival. They have low survival skills. And then two, that these artificial sweeteners are, in most cases, extraordinarily, their synthetic compounds. Like saccharin was, or is, a derivative of coal tar that was accidentally discovered when they were trying to find

a new dye. Yeah. And then, I believe, aspartame was a non-starter ulcer drug. Yeah, and the dude was literally picking up paper and looked his finger and said, oh, well, that's, isn't that how LSD? That was an accident, too. It was, it was.

Are no scientists washing their hands anymore? No, apparently not. At least not the chemists. Wow. Oh, yeah, I guess so, chemistry. I don't want to throw all of science under the steamer. No, it's just the chemists who don't care where they live or die.

So anyway, saccharin, which is one of the first, or I guess the first, artificial sweetener way back in 1879. Yeah, way back in 1979. In 1879, that was a scientist who did not wash his hands before dinner and noticed it tasted sweet and said, I think I have a new discovery on my hands. Yeah. Literally on my hands.

And on my tongue. And boy, oh boy, is it sweet. Yeah. And it's funny to think of that, yeah, there's a lot of chemicals and compounds out there that we may have no clue actually taste sweet, because we just haven't accidentally run across them yet like that.

Because everyone's washing their hands now. Yeah, and plus also, sugar has just such great PR that you tend to think that it has the market cornered on the sweet sensation. But no, it's just one of many things that elicit that. Yeah. And the reason, well, there's a lot of artificial sweeteners. We're only going to go over a handful in detail.

But the reason there are, I mean, there are a couple of reasons. One is just good old fashioned competition, of course. And another is you can't use them all in the same way. Like some hold up under baking. Some don't. Some you can just dust in a throat lozenge. And another might be good in a cake batter, you know? So it kind of depends on its use as to,

some are good in ice cream and others aren't. Yeah, but you hit it on the head though, too. I mean, like there is a lot of competition. Like Aspartame is owned by Monsanto now. And like anytime those guys get in on something, there's, that means it's automatically big business. So there's a lot, a lot of money to be made. And one of the reasons why also that it is such a big business

because it's very frequently much cheaper to produce this stuff, these artificial sweeteners than it is to process sugar, right? So say it takes like eight cents worth of sugar to sweeten a two liter of Coke. It might take three cents worth of Aspartame to sweeten Coke Zero. And if you're making millions upon millions of two liters

of this stuff a year, that adds up pretty quick. And in fact, there was actually a British company, I didn't see which one it was, but they, it was found that their orange drink, which was not being marketed as diet or sugar-free or anything, was basically made up of artificial sweeteners. How was this?

I didn't look it up. Oh, oh. I just ran across it somewhere. It was the orange, orange like soda in Great Britain. Oh, in Great Britain. Okay. I feel pretty good. Call it Shea Made.

Well, the reason I asked is because, you know, my one weakness is like once a month, I'll get the old Fanna Orange. Yeah, the Nazi drink. Oh, so I'm okay with that. Shaming me. Well, so these things are pretty controversial. Since literally, since the first ones came around,

people started like with anything that's new and synthetic. There are gonna be a certain segment of people like this is great in another segment. They're like, well, I don't know about this. Let's look and see what's going on in your body and what if it's not so good for you and how do we know? Right. People concerned with health.

Yeah, that's an easier way to say it. And public health. Yeah. Yeah, there's, it does kind of seem to be like Chuck we're at this point in history where there is a lot of this stuff out there. I think I saw a 2016 article that said there's like 3,500 products in the US using at least one of the five

approved artificial sweeteners by the FDA. Wow. So there's tons of products out there and not enough medical literature to really strongly show one way or the other that yeah, these things actually are pretty safe. And like all these fears are just a general public distrust of science and change and unnaturalness.

And we don't also have anything to show the other way too that no, actually these things are pretty unsafe. Cause it seems like every study that you find has a contradictory study with just completely opposite findings. Yeah, it's pretty frustrating. Yeah. And they're like, they're cancelling each other out.

It is frustrating. It does seem though that at least based on the reporting that I'm seeing or have seen in research, it seems like a body of medical literature is mounting that's showing that the stuff is pretty problematic actually. Yeah. I mean, if you just throw science out the window and start perusing the internet,

which everyone should do, right? At least once a day. If you go on websites though and internet forums and look around, people will blame, I mean, just about any disease you can think of on aspartame is a big one that's getting a lot of the heat, but all kinds of artificial sweeteners, MS, brain tumors, dizziness, Alzheimer's,

like all kinds of problems people are saying, well, you know, this didn't start happening until I started eating or drinking this, which contain this. Right. Yeah. It's anecdotal. Extremely anecdotal. And like you said, when you look at the real studies, we're going to get to some of these. And of course, some are mounted by the very company

selling them. And I had a thing on Facebook last week about these company backed studies and whether or not we should even listen to them. And most people chimed in that were in the biz and said, you know what, it doesn't mean it's junk science. A lot of these studies wouldn't even be done if it wasn't for these companies funding them.

But I still like raise an eyebrow anytime I see like, nope, Coca-Cola debunks study that says it's bad for you with their own study, you know? Like how can you, I'm not even a big cynic. And you just have to sort of wonder if that's complete BS or not. Yeah. Well, the FDA for its part, if you go to their website

on their Q and A, as far as them defending the things that they've approved, they kind of, well, I'll just read it. It says, all consumer complaints related to the sweetener have been investigated as thoroughly as possible by federal authorities for more than five years and part under FDA's arms system or arm system, adverse reaction monitoring system. In addition, scientific, and that's where people can submit

their own beefs basically, right? Yeah. And say like, hey, I'm dizzy, I just drank a tab. Yeah, exactly. In addition, scientific studies conducted during Aspartame's pre-approval phase fail to show that it causes any adverse reactions that adults or children, individuals who have concerns

about possible adverse reactions to Aspartame or other substances should contact their physician. Basically, hey, if you're not feeling good, maybe it's on you. Yeah, why don't you stop being so metabolically weird? Go to your doctor. Yeah. And since you brought up the FDA, there's a lot of concerns about how,

just how much oversight they're bringing to the table. Yeah. And from, there was this Washington Post article I found. Yeah, I read that too, man. It sounds like not much at all. There's this separate track. It's basically like an expedited track that a company who's looking for FDA approval

for their food item can submit. Yeah. And rather than, so ideally there's this FDA review process where the FDA says, let us see your studies. We're gonna do some research. We might do some testing ourselves. It's gonna take forever. You're gonna lose a bunch of money

while you're sitting there waiting to go to market. But we will know pretty, pretty conclusively that it's safe for humans to use. Yeah. Although even that's not necessarily true, but that's like the ideal situation that we'll get maybe close to, yes, this is safe for humans. Well, they've basically done away with that

and created this fast track program where you can submit for generally regarded as safe status. Yeah, that was 1997 is when everything kind of, there was a big sea change there. Yeah. And they did it because business was like, guys, you're taking so long. This is so slow.

This process is killing us. It's costing us so much cash. We wanna go to market faster. Well, the FDA was like, we don't have enough people. Right. What do we do? So instead of hiring more people, they just made it easier for the companies

to get this stuff passed. And the way that they did that was that FDA said, how about this, you guys go study the medical literature, write a review of what you find and we'll read your review. Yeah. And then we'll give you approval. So you don't need to submit your data anymore. Just give us your findings, your findings in a summary.

And that should speed things up. And it did in a big, big way. And it proved the FDA was so toothless that apparently now a lot of companies are releasing food additives into the food supply without even talking to the FDA about it. It said in this article that one of the deputy commissioners for food at the FDA, he said,

we simply do not have the information to vouch for the safety of many of these chemicals. The FDA is just like, oh, well, there's a new food additive out there. I hope it goes well for everybody. Yeah. And I don't know if in the FDA's defense but what they said initially was the reason we did this

is we thought that people were doing this anyway and just introducing new chemicals without like submitting for approval at all. He said, so maybe if we streamline this process, they'll at least do that. And that just hasn't worked out how they hoped. No, no, it's like Citizens United ruling. Oh yeah.

You know. All right, well, let's take a break. I need to go, I'm angry now. Sorry. I need to go smash. We'll be back right after this. Let's go. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you should know. OK, we're back. Chuck, you feeling better? Yeah. That Ming Vaz, man. That was like an original. Yeah, well, that was real.

It's a goner now. That's going to come out of Jerry's pay. Let's get some super glue. Oh, yeah, like that Brady Bunch episode? Mama always said, don't play ball in the house. Oh, did they break something? Yeah, they broke a vase playing basketball in the house. And they tried to glue it back together.

And then Mrs. Brady used it for some flowers and sprung a bunch of leaks. That's so dumb. I love those chips. What do you do when playing basketball inside anyway? That's dumb. Just horse play, rough housing, the use. I mean, their outside was a studio set with Astra Turf.

Like, it's always perfect weather. Yeah, and that one little quarter driveway. I bet it would be so disappointing if you could go see a recreation of that set today. You know? Yeah. It's like I sat at the Cheers Bar once, the real, not the one in Boston, but where they shot the TV show.

Oh, OK. And it's just, everything's just always smaller, you know? And that was a big set. Including Rhea Perelman. She was tiny. She was like, in my beer mug. Yeah, I was going to say the one in Boston, it's like nothing like the set.

So I thought that's where you were going. I didn't realize you'd been on the actual set. Yeah, that's when I did my famous extra stint on Dear John. And Cheers was next door. OK, I don't know this story. Yeah, yeah, when my brother, he worked on Dear John and I went out to visit him and he got me on as an extra.

I played a bus boy in a restaurant scene. Did you really? Yeah, I'd love to get a copy of that, actually, and post it. Yeah, I want to see that. It was pretty good. Yeah. That was my first encounter, like real encounter with the film business.

And I was like, this is a weird thing to do. This is the life for me. I'm going to play bus boys all my life. And one day, I'm going to have a short-lived failure of a TV show myself. All right, so where were we? We were talking about a TV show. Oh, no, no, no.

We were talking about coming back from the break. And I wanted to mention, you said earlier that when we first introed that sometimes this stuff like does more harm. And this one Purdue University study, I thought was really interesting because it found that drinking or eating and drinking sugar-free stuff with diet drinks, mainly, can actually mess with your body's ability to naturally count calories

because it just messes up what the body recognizes as real sweet and real calories, which can make you fatter. Right, yeah. Apparently, there's been a number of studies, including really, really good longitudinal studies, like the San Antonio Heart Study, that have found that high levels of diet-soda intake are correlated with obesity, meaning everything else equal.

The person who drinks more diet-soda is likely to be obese, which makes zero sense. It's pretty confounding, right? The whole reason or one of the big reasons people drink diet-soda is so they can lose weight. But it turns out that they're actually more likely to be obese, and I should say compared to people who don't drink diet-soda,

not compared to people who drink non-diet-soda. That's not to say a diet Coke drinker is more likely to be obese than a Coke drinker. It's a diet Coke drinker is more likely to be obese than somebody who just drinks water. Right, and this Purdue study really gives some insight to that. Basically, our body tells us how many calories we need

to take in, and part of that is based on how sweet something is. So once we start drinking and ingesting these artificial sweeteners, it just goofs everything up. It basically says that our body doesn't associate sweetness with higher calories anymore. Yeah, right, because with something like artificial sweetened soda, when you eat food,

your body has a couple of pathways that it rewards you for saying, hey, good job. You eat food. I'm going to make it so that you want to eat food again. And one is the gustatory pathway or gustatory component, which is like the taste, the smell, the sensation that you get from eating good food or something sweet and delicious.

And that just activates your limbic system like crazy. Your reward pathway goes nuts, right? But when you eat stuff, you also have the second component, which is where you're satiated, the feeling that you get, that great pleasant feeling of being nice and pleasantly full from eating, right? And that counters that gustatory excitement. So normally, when you eat food, you

get the excitement from the taste of it. And then ultimately, you'll also get the nice pleasant feeling from being full from it. Not so with an artificial sweetened soda. Instead, you get the excitement. Your sugar rush is going off, but you're never going to get full. And since we're nothing but junkies,

as far as our brains are wired, we're just going to keep drinking more and more and more because that sugar center is going off and we're never getting full, so it's never counteracted. We just always crave more and more and more. Yeah. And of course, like you said, these studies, there's always an opposite one.

It was debunked as flawed by the National Soft Drink Association. Yeah. So they didn't even try. They just said, wrong. But that's not that produce study is not the only study. There have been plenty of other studies that have looked into this and have found the same thing

that our bodies are being tricked, that we're no longer associating sweet foods with high calorie foods and that it's leading to eating more high calorie foods. So that if you eat something that actually is sweet and has calories, you're going to eat more of it than you would have before because your brain's not used to saying, I've got enough calories from this.

I can stop eating it now. Right. Playing tricks on your body. Yeah. And plus also, apparently, with these things that are 300, 500, 7,000 times sweeter than sugar, which is what our body is used to is some form of sugar, the sensation of sweetness is amplified.

And so it kind of mutes sweetness and other things like fruit or any other complex tastes like vegetables. So we end up just craving more and more sweet stuff because everything else tastes terrible compared to this ultra sweet stuff that we're eating and drinking. And if you stop drinking like soda or diet soda or whatever, stop eating junk food for even just like a week or so, when you go back to it, it's amazing how sweet

that stuff actually is. Oh, I bet. It's like a smack in the face. But you realize, wow, I've really been used to this for a while because I don't remember it tasting this sweet. Yeah. And my headaches are now gone because I'm drinking this again.

Exactly. Well, and the other thing too, and I know we covered a little bit of this in the high fructose corn syrup, but part of the problem is the ubiquity of this stuff. It's, I think, which one was it? Was it aspartame that's in? Yeah, aspartame is in 6,000, more than 6,000 products.

Yeah. Like soft drinks, of course, gum, puddings, dessert mixes, gelatin, frozen desserts, fillings, yogurts. And of course, people just dump it right into their coffee too in its purist form. But unless you're really a stickler about looking at food labels, you're getting way, way more than the maximum recommended levels

that you should be ingesting of this stuff because it might be, like I said, and I got a sore throat, so I took the cough drop, and now I'm chewing gum. Now I'm using toothpaste, and it's all over the place. Right, exactly. And that's another part of the problem where even if the FDA is doing its job

and does all this research and looks at the medical literature, they may say, OK, this stuff is safe at this level. This is the maximum recommended amount that a person should have and still be within the safe zone per day. So don't put more than this in your soda, OK? Great.

Go forth and prosper. And then that soda becomes a success, and other people start using that sweetener. And then it's like you said, like with aspartame. It's everywhere so that the people are getting that amount just from that soda with aspartame that they're drinking. But they're also getting it from all these other places,

and the levels rise very quickly. Yeah, and some folks get, I mean, there's a definite soft drink addiction problem, even with the diet sodas. I've known people who literally drank like a couple of two liters a day of this stuff. Sure, yeah. Like just constantly drinking soda all day long

from the moment they get up to the moment they go to bed. Right, yeah. But it's diet, so it's no big deal. Exactly. And there's actually a study that I came across. I didn't see where the study was from, but it was mentioned on this Harvard Health blog. It was a rat study where rats were

given the choice between oral saccharine and intravenous cocaine after they'd been acclimated to both, and they tended to choose the saccharine. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, slightly. Did they go round and round? Sorry. They're probably like, I've heard about that cocaine.

I'm not doing that, but I will do the saccharine. By the way, there is an audio interview on YouTube with the drummer from the band Rat that's like an hour and 20 minutes long that you should, I mean, try and get through 15 or 20 minutes of it. But the way I saw it is someone said, this is the Donald Trump of 80s hair metal. Was it a contemporary, like today?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He basically has a new group that does rat songs. And I think he's just the drummer that's the original member. And it just goes off for like an hour and a half about how great they are and about how that's the real stuff and how they sound better than the original rat ever sounded. And it's really something. Like, I've never heard someone who was more full of themselves

than this dude. Wow. It was hysterical. It was really wonderful. How many songs could they possibly play? Did they just play round and round like 12 or 13 times at a show? Yeah, they had a few hits.

All I remember is round and round. No, they also, well, I'll think on it. They were not a one hit wonder, though. I'll bet you're thinking of Cinderella or Dockin. No. I think Dockin had more hits than Rat. No, they had, lay it down. Remember that one?

No. Can you sing it? Sure you do. Lay it down right now. Oh, that's awesome. And then they had Wanted Man. No, that's Bon Jovi. That's Wanted Man now.

And then You're in Love and Way Cool Junior. They had, I would say, four genuine sort of hits. I really honestly, I remember round and round and that's it. Well, they were a little bit poor your time, too. Round and round was a pretty good song, though. It was a great song. Rat. Should we just end the show?

Actually, let's take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk specifically about some of these sweeteners. Does that sound good? It sounds sweet. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I can't believe you don't remember, you're in love. Well, you're not singing it, so how could I possibly remember it?

And lay it down, those were two big, big hits. I mean, I'm telling you, I was paying a lot of attention to 80s hair metal when it was out. I bet it came on. You'd probably be like, oh, I know that song. All right. Remember Striper, the Christian hair metal band? I saw Striper in concert, my friend.

Did you? The fabulous Fox Theater, and it went. Did you really? I did. Awesome. It wasn't. They had more than one hit, didn't they? Yeah, I was way into that in my early youth group days.

Striper. Well, they rocked. About as tough as you could get. Well, I don't know about that, but they definitely rocked. For sure. Well, I don't know about that. Well, they definitely wore a lot of spandex. Their drummer played sideways, that was his big trick.

They set it up completely sideways on the stage. He's not actually playing sideways then. No, no, no, he's playing straight ahead. He just has the drum kit sideways. That was the gimmick, huh? Yeah. That in religion. Pretty good.

All right, so let's talk about saccharine. Let's. That was, it's actually the Latin word for sugar. And that was the one we said earlier, which is the OG, discovered by two chemists named Johns and Hopkins. Well, that's it. That's so two guys claimed it. One was definitely in the lab because he was the one who licked

his, well, he ate a bread roll, I guess. Oh, really? That was sweet. And he was like, I don't think this is supposed to be sweet and came to realize it was soaking in. The coal tar that was on his fingers. Wow. Yeah.

Oh, I thought you meant it was sitting in a little pool of coal tar and he like didn't notice it. Yeah, that was weird. He was warming it up on the Bunsen burner. So yeah, an accidental discovery. And it is 300 times sweeter than sugar. Yeah. And this is one of the ones that is no calorie

because it is not metabolized by the body at all. No. And it is very famous. Well, I don't know about famous, but the drink tab, the soft drink tab, it was very famous for being sweetened in a big way by saccharine. Right. Which means that from the, I think, 1977 till 1997, maybe,

there was a warning label on tab that said, quote, use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharine, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals. Yeah. You remember that warning label on it? Oh, yeah. And you can also still find, I mean, it's not like it went away.

That is what sweetened low is. And if you drink fountain diet coke or Pepsi, fountain Pepsi, you're going to have saccharine in there. Yep. And Emily was big on the fountain diet cokes. She was like, it's just not the same for McCann. And I called her to the day. I was like, it's because of saccharine.

She went, what? She's off those now, too, though. Yeah, that'll do it. But what's weird, so I read this really great post on Today I Found Out, which is an excellent website, by the way. Yeah, it's a good one. And they wrote about the discovery of saccharine and then the controversy, the health controversies of saccharine.

And the case they make is that it's basically the victim of bad science reporting and public fear, basically, and that if you're a rodent, yes, you should not be drinking tab. Because there was discovery of bladder cancer and other types of cancer, but specifically bladder cancer in lab rats that were being fed saccharine. And I guess before they figured out exactly why,

the media went and extrapolated it onto people. And so in the public's mind, it became saccharine will give you bladder cancer. And then by the time they went and researched what was going on, there's like the specific, I think, the specific parts of rat urine. We're combining with the saccharine to form these things called micro crystals in the bladder,

which is tearing up the bladder lining. So frequently, that as the cells were regenerating, the potential for them to grow out of control and become tumors was increased. And so the lab rats were getting bladder cancer. The thing is, is the lab rats urine is not the same as humans urine. No.

And so we just don't get bladder cancer from tab, apparently, or from saccharine. Well, yeah, and one of the things, I mean, I never really knew this, how they exactly tested. I figured because it was a rat, they would just give them like, you know, a few drops or something, because they're tiny, but they apparently dose these lab mice and rats

with lots of these additives, large, large doses. And apparently that's to compensate for the fact that they don't use a lot of mice and rats. Yeah. Which I'm not, I don't follow the logic there. There isn't any. Okay. And then they follow it up with, wow,

that seems to have really gotten on top of you. How about some intravenous cocaine to purge you up? Well, they also said the large doses compensate for possibilities that rodents may be less sensitive to it. Yeah, but I've also read elsewhere that the stuff that they're, the tests they're conducting, at least on humans too, are not real world tests. It's like, oh, you just drank a 12 ounce Diet Coke,

and now we're going to base all of our medical recommendations on the impact it has on your body. Right. They're not taking into account, like you said, the guy who drinks two liters or two 12 packs of Diet Coke a day. For 20, 30 years. Right, exactly.

And like this stuff is generally just too new for us to have any studies on long-term effects of them. So we really just don't know. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to foster... Paranoia. Fear, yeah, or paranoia, or even just, yeah, fear or paranoia.

But like the jury's still out as far as I'm concerned. Agreed. For its part though, saccharin was removed from the NIH's list of carcinogens, and they did remove that warning label in the late 90s, like you said. Yeah, and I should say, I'm not specifically talking about saccharin,

I'm talking about artificial sweeteners in general. Yeah, totally. The jury's still out. But on to Aspartame, that's one of the big targets these days, equal, neutrosweet and nutritaste, or the brand names that it's sold under. And this is a derivative of a couple of amino acids, aspartic acid, and phenylalanine.

Lalanine? Yeah. Phenylalanine. I think that's right, yeah. And this has been around since 1965, and this was a chemist named Jim Schlatter, a part of a company which is now Pfizer, and he was the one that was licking his finger

to pick up paper, and studying in anti-ulcer drugs. And he went, hey, I taste 180 to 200 times sweeter than sugar to me. Right. And so that's what it's used for. Oh yeah, well, I don't think they treat ulcers with it anymore. No, but the weird thing about Aspartame

is more in how it's broken down in the body, I think. Yeah, because it is metabolized. Yeah, and this just blew my mind. I had no idea that something like that could break down into methanol in your body. Yeah, wood alcohol. Weird. I mean, that's one of three things.

Aspartic acid, and then phenylalanine. Lalanine, man. And methanol is what it breaks down into. That's just crazy. Right, and so if you do not have this disorder called PKU or phenylketonuria, it's the wood alcohol you have to pay attention to. But if you have PKU, then you've got a big problem

with the phenylalanine because you're missing an enzyme that breaks that down, and it can build up in your brain and create brain damage in you. So people who have PKU or phenylketonuria can't have Aspartame at all because of that. But for people who do not have PKU, you still have to worry about the methanol, though,

that wood alcohol, if I remember correctly, isn't that the stuff that the US government used to poison the illicit alcohol supply with? And a bunch of people went blind and died? Back in the prohibition. I don't remember, but that sounds right. I think it was wood alcohol, and it's just so toxic. And normally, when we consume something

that has wood alcohol in it, it's in the presence of ethanol. And it's absorbed differently. The ethanol neutralizes it a little bit. But in Aspartame, it's breaking down into methanol without the presence of ethanol, and so we're absorbing this toxic component just straight up. Yeah, 10% of Aspartame is absorbed as methanol,

and the EPA says there's a recommended limit of 7.8 milligrams per day of methanol, and drinking one liter of an Aspartame sweetened beverage contains 56 milligrams of methanol. Well, is that saying 56 milligrams of absorbed methanol or 56 milligrams of Aspartame? I think, I don't know. I think that means methanol.

That's how I took it. Yeah, so eight times recommended amount in one liter of an Aspartame sweetened beverage. That's not good. Well, and like you were saying, how the ethanol counterbalances it, it's the same as the amino acids. They're naturally part of our diet,

but usually when we consume it there, it's counterbalanced by other amino acids, and in the case of Aspartame, it doesn't have those, so it's just consuming it on its own. Right. So you're getting it in very high doses, basically. Yeah, and there's been at least one study that has linked different types of cancers

in female rats to Aspartame consumption. Right, but again, no official studies show any official problems. Well, none that the FDA is pointing to. Like that was Europe, they're overprotective. Yeah, but this is one of the ones too that arms program where you can call in and report things. I think it accounts for 75% of all complaints there.

Like I'm dizzy, I got headaches, I got seizures, I got fatigue. It's killing me. It's killing me, Doc. You gotta do something. What's next, sucralose? Sucralose, like Splenda. Right.

So sucralose is Splenda's marketed, or it was marketed with the kind of slogan made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar, right? And apparently they got sued by the sugar industry, because I guess people thought that Splenda was natural. I think there was some sort of poll that found like 57% of people thought that Splenda was a natural artificial sweetener,

and it's not. It's actually, you take a sugar molecule, and then you take out three of the hydroxyl groups, hydrogen and oxygen groups, and you replace those with chlorine. This is always a good move. Yeah, that's no longer sugar. Nope, that's not sugar anymore.

It's not natural either. So what you have is sucralose, and sucralose is 600 times sweeter than sugar, and it's not metabolized by the body, so it's calorie free, but there have been studies that have found that it might not be metabolized by the body, but it's absorbed by the body.

It's been found in the blood immediately after drinking a can of sucralose-sweetened soda, and it's also been found in breast milk too from others who have drank sucralose-sweetened drinks. Yeah, and sucralose is one of those you're gonna find, because it holds up to heat, so you're gonna find it in a lot of baked goods or processed baked goods,

or in the, I was about to call them kits, what are they called? The Easy Bake Oven? No, you know, when you go to make a cake, and you get the stuff. Mix. Yeah, the mix, not a kit. I like kit though.

That's a good one. Yeah, I need a cake kit to go to the hardware store. I don't know what you mean, pal. Look, it's been a long day. Please leave me alone. But Splenda is one of the biggest, probably heaviest used sweetener, just like I was gonna call it an over-the-counter sweetener,

but when you just use it for a sweetener alone, to sweeten your tea or your coffee or whatever. Yeah. Like you see a lot of Splenda, because it has that little green leaf on it. Oh, Splenda, I thought Splenda was the yellow one. Oh. Stevie is the one with the green leaf.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, you're right. Yeah, Stevie actually is natural. It comes from a plant. Okay. All that. All right, I didn't feel much better about the green leaf. Yes, sucralose or Splenda is sugar with chlorine. Oh yeah, Splenda, that yellow packet, that's right.

Yeah, yeah. Sweet and low as pink. Yep. Stevie has got the green leaf. I used to dump that sweet and low in my iced tea when I was a kid, because I knew no better. Did you really? Wow.

Well, because, you know, you put sugar and cold iced tea, it does nothing, but just go to the bottom. I know. It's absolutely frustrating. And then I was like, oh, wait a minute, I'm from Georgia, I need to be drinking sweetened tea, which is while they're brewing it, they dump in a full one pound bag of sugar.

So much. Like they say down here that the straw's supposed to stand straight up in the tea, and that's how you know when you have enough sugar in your sweet tea. Yeah, I don't drink sweet tea much anymore, but boy, I love it. Yeah, I do too. It's really good.

So sucralose, for its worth, is controversial in the public sphere as aspartame is, but those report the FDA in 1998 that said it's approved, but it did cause minor genetic damage in mouth cells, but it was minor and weakly mutagenetic. Yeah, may cause light cancer. And like you said, weren't they sued by the sugar industry, didn't you say that?

Yeah, I don't know what the outcome was. I don't know, I haven't heard that slogan in a while, so I'll bet the sugar industry won. Yeah, now it's just Splenda, you know the deal. Yeah, you know what we used to say, just think, just think hard. Google it. And then finally, we have sugar alcohols,

which I wasn't super familiar with actually. I am because up until this week, chewed a lot of sugar-free gum. Oh. And a lot of it is sweetened with sugar alcohols, which is where you take a sugar and you add a hydrogen atom to it, right? So there's stuff like Zorbital, Xylitol, Ethiritol.

Yeah, I even practiced that one, Ethiritol. Yes, thank you. Had a little trouble with it, but they don't have calories because they're not typically absorbed by the body, although some actually do have just about as many calories as sugar. So you do have to kind of watch it.

But sugar alcohols typically are used less for weight loss and more for like sugar or blood sugar control like among people with diabetes. Oh, okay. Because so it might have the calories, but it doesn't have the glycemic load that sugar does. And even some artificial sweeteners do, but they taste really, really good.

They're about as close to sugar as you can possibly get and still have fewer calories or whatever. The problem with them is that they can, they're like a butterfish, escarole. Yeah. They cause the anal leakage. Yeah. I'm gonna bring that up every chance I get, you know.

I think we have our first great band name of 2017 too. Not anal leakage, but glycemic load. A anal leakage, no one wants to hear that. No. It's like diarrhea planet. Oh yeah. Didn't they tweet back at us? Poop knife.

Is that what it was you were telling diarrhea planet to change the name of poop knife? Yeah, they tweeted never. Never, who are you? Yeah. Yeah, so that lacks of effect. If you have a daily dose of 50 grams or 20 grams, 50 grams of the sorbitol or 20 grams of the mannitol,

it has to be labeled that it has a lack of effect. Yeah, but the center for science in the public interest says no, no, no, only 10 grams of sorbitol can make you poop your pants. So maybe you guys should lower it for that warning. And the FDA said, look, man, we're taking a nap. Yeah. They're like, can we just have people

on the verge of pooping their pants, but not quite? Right. Oh dear. Yeah, I saw an alternative to all this, you know. Oh, what, real sugar? That is one alternative. And the thing is, yeah, the upshot of all this is, well, maybe sugar is not so bad.

Refined sugar is pretty bad for you. And so is high fructose corn syrup. But there are plenty of natural forms of sugar too, like unrefined raw demerara sugar or honey. There's a lot of places you can get sweetness that aren't necessarily bad for you, sure, right? But then if you're super hip with the science too, you might be in favor of what are called

sweet tasting proteins. And these are actually pretty cutting-edge from what I've seen. There's seven that have been identified so far. All of them come from plants that grow in the rainforest. And they are proteins. They're not carbohydrates. They're actual proteins.

Like silicon? Yeah, yeah, the Paraguay and sweet chicken. Paraguay and sweet bird? Yeah, so they're not gonna raise your glycemic index like your blood sugar. They're not going to lead to weight gain. They're just proteins. And apparently some of them are quite sweet

and they're looking into using those as an alternative to the artificial sweeteners, which are the alternatives to sugar. So they can decimate the rainforest in yet another way. Well, hopefully this will help them protect the rainforest. They'll be like, no, no, no. This is where our sweet comes from. Got ya.

Stop cutting it down. Okay. Keep your fingers crossed. They're crossed. Okay, that's all I got. That's all I got. So that's artificial sweeteners, everybody. If you want to know more about those,

you can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And the noid will appear. And since I said noid, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this warmed my heart over the holidays. Scotch. Hi, yeah, that too. Hi, Josh and Chuck, I'm Grace and I'm 17 years old

and the oldest of three sisters, Lily, 15, Rose, 10. Great names. Yeah. We started listening to your podcast in 2009 when our parents split up and we moved a state away from our dad. As a tradition now, we always listen to a podcast of yours

to this very day when we are traveling between the two states with our dad. It's been such a fun way to pass the time during road trips. Your podcasts have been the source of so many interesting conversations and such a wonderful way to bring our family together over the years. For instance, all three of us girls

vividly remember the Vulture episode for no apparent reason and found the Haunted House episode oddly cool. Lily, who was the 15 year old, she enjoys the Halloween story episodes, Rose, 10, thinks it's funny when you guys get off track. God bless you, Rose. And I really like to annoy my friends with all the useless facts that I now know.

We are such hardcore fans that we even had marathons of your TV series. Whoa. Wow. And we have literally been a fan of you guys since you started. Thanks for being a part of our childhood. Love the Harvey family.

That's fantastic. That was a fantastic email. It was great. I saw a piece in a picture of Dad behind the wheel driving with, it looked like Grace up front and Lillian Rose in the back. And they were all just smiling and just, they just had this lovely aura about them.

Thanks to us. Yep. Nope. Thanks to the Vulture episode. Anyway, I love the Harvey family now. They're tops on my list. Yeah, thanks a lot, Harvey family, for writing in. We appreciate that big time.

And to old man Harvey, you're doing the right thing, sir. Yep. Keep both hands on the wheel. That's right. If you want to get in touch with us like the Harvey's did to let us know how much of a role we've played in your life, we love hearing that kind of stuff.

You can tweet to us. I'm at Josh, I'm Clark, and we're also at SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web,

stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.