Sandy Resnick and her family used to revel in sugary desserts such as huge, hot, chocolate chip cookies with melting vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipped cream.
But that was before Resnick's 12-year-old daughter, Leah, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Resnick started realizing how often the family would turn to sugar as a "very, very available quick fix for hunger." Leah also realized that when she ate desserts her blood sugar would spike and she would get stomachaches and headaches until the insulin she injected kicked in.
The Resnicks, who live in La Canada, turned unhappily to artificial sweeteners, one of which ruined a batch of homemade spaghetti sauce with a metallic taste. Then Resnick heard about sucralose, the newest low-calorie fake sugar on the market, which she was thrilled to discover "really tastes like sugar." Resnick now makes cookies, pastries and even spaghetti sauce with sucralose, "everything I used to make with sugar."
Out of solidarity with Leah, Resnick sticks to sucralose-sweetened desserts as well. She's lost 12 pounds and has been inspired to start exercising to lose 20 more. As for Leah, her blood sugar stays lower so she's using less insulin. And to her mother's delight, Leah is also eating "healthier portions" of vegetables, meat, potatoes and rice, foods she didn't have as much room for when she ate sugar-sweetened desserts.
The sucralose-loving Resnicks are not alone. Since sucralose, marketed under the name Splenda, started appearing on supermarket shelves 10 months ago, it has spurred a 10% increase in sales of low-calorie sweeteners, according to market research firm Information Resources Inc.
But many health officials are decidedly less enthusiastic than consumers. They caution that the arrival of one more artificial sweetener--no matter how sugar-like its taste--is unlikely to steer Americans away from the overindulgence that is fueling this country's duel epidemics of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. After all, in the last decade Americans have gotten fatter and the incidence of diabetes has risen while downing record quantities of refined sugars and artificial sweeteners.
"There is no evidence that artificial sweeteners have had any impact at all either on sugar or calorie consumption," says Marion Nestle, chairwoman of New York University's department of nutrition and food studies.
