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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   1603 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 23, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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I gave up real sugar and high-fructose corn syrup years ago in favor of artificial sweeteners like Splenda, aspartame, and stevia. Last week, I decided to also give up zero calorie artificially sweetened drinks on Jim's advice. It's done wonders for controlling my hunger. On the minus side, non-sweet tea and juice taste awful; I would rather just drink cold water at that point. So that's another source of enjoyment gone from my life.

What about raw honey ?

isn't that just sugar?

  • antioxidants

I use a tablespoon with my decaf green tea, mint, 1/2 lemon every night just about

If by non-sweet tea you mean the pre-made Southern kind, yeah I enjoy it as a Southern thing but it's low-quality, industrially processed tea and it's not going to be good on its own. If you'd like a neat little hobby, try getting into brewing your own iced tea with high-quality ingredients - tons of variety as well as better taste.

Try some unsweetened fruit flavored seltzers. It’s gotten to the point where those taste as good as Sprite to me.

I was thinking about a post extolling the wonders of artificial sweeteners, courtesy of popping into the local Taco Bell and making good use of their unlimited drink refills.

All the Pepsi Max and Diet Coke a man could dream of, without the normal consequences on the waistline? Whoever made the nectar of the gods zero calorie deserves a Nobel, maybe two. And they're safe, last time I reviewed the claims about potential downsides I was thoroughly unconvinced.

The only thing I've heard of regarding artificial sweeteners that I thought had enough evidence to be potentially concerned about was potential changes in gut microbiota, but since I don't drink any artificially sweetened drinks I kind of stopped following the news for this.

Maybe I should make a habit of replacing the little amount of sweetened drinks I do have with stevia-replaced ones....

Yeah my experience whether on or off keto was that sucralose & sugar alcohols didn't disrupt my hunger/satiation. And I thought as of maybe 10+ years ago, the story was that while each of the artificial sweeteners have slightly different results with different people, they all had extremely low metabolic response compared to dietary carbs in general. The idea of your body being 'tricked' into producing a flood of insulin by the apparent encountered sweetness seems like some kind of psychological intuition that some people may find useful, but that wasn't backed by evidence.

And it's crazy to hear dentists saying 'luckily you're not a soda drinker' when looking at perfect teeth, whenever I'm drinking an impressively expensive amount of energy drinks instead of coffee.

The idea of your body being 'tricked' into producing a flood of insulin by the apparent encountered sweetness seems like some kind of psychological intuition that some people may find useful, but that wasn't backed by evidence.

This is 99% of health/diet/nutrition research...just hunches without any evidence or only cherry-picked evidence. All macros produce an insulin spike. It's how digestion works. Otherwise, it would be type 1 diabetes. The same pleasure you get from candy or ice cream is no different from a fatty steak even though the macros are different.

Splenda has calories, about the same as a sugar per gram. 3.5 calories per gram . but they are allowed to round it down to zero.

i was wondering what happened to jim. He owned jim . com which is worth a fortune. and then he stopped updating

My understanding is that all the artificial sweeteners have calories, it's just that they taste so intensely sweet to us that you have to use a tiny amount compared to sugar. And that makes the calories negligible.

Calories are the literal energy content. The subjective taste is irrelevant.

The point is that drinks sweetened with artificial sweeteners have 100 times less calories than drinks sweetened with sugar, because they have 100 times less of the sweetener. And 100 times less calories is so little that it can be rounded down to zero.

It does not matter. A tiny packet has 1 gram, or about 3.5 calories. The sweetness is irrelevant. The rounding down is because it's less than the allowed threshold

Cooking spray doesn't have zero calories, but the reason people think that's true is essentially due to a loophole in nutrition labeling requirements. Essentially, the label says it's 0 calories because of the declared serving size. For any foods, if the declared serving size contains less than 5 kcal (calories), the manufacturer is permitted to round down to 0. This is exactly the reason why Tic-Tacs - probably the most well-known example of this - indicate that they have 0 calories per serving, even though technically each Tic-Tac mint averages about 2 calories. Since the serving size is <5 calories, it can be rounded down to 0.

https://old.reddit.com/r/nutrition/comments/xpsky0/how_does_cooking_spray_have_zero_calories/#:~:text=Since%20the%20serving%20size%20is,much%20any%20liquid%20cooking%20oil.

A normal can of Pepsi has 40g of sugar. A can of diet pepsi has 0.124g of sweetener. Even if the sweetener has the same calories per weight, you would have to drink 300 times more of the diet version to get the same calories as the sugar version. What makes this possible is that per weight, the sweetener tastes much sweeter than sugar. The sweetness is the most relevant thing.

For what it's worth, i can easily eat a lot of the stuff raw without it affecting me much . Sweetness is subjective, i guess. During my diet I was unwittingly adding 200 calories a day by using too much of it, so the calories do matter. I originally thought it was zero calories, but I was wrong.

When I look at something called Splenda Original Sweetener packets, I can see from the ingredients list that it contains dextrose, maltodextrin and sucralose. Dextrose is just sugar, (even the wikipedia page redirects to glucose), maltodextrin is another kind of sugar that may or may not get digested, and the ingredient mentioned last, sucralose, is the actual zero calorie sweetener. So it seems that the product called Splenda actually is mostly just sugar, with a tiny bit of super sweet sweetener added.

The lesson here is probably not that sweetness is subjective, but that you should read the ingredients list if you want to be careful about what you eat.

I would get a bag of something like pure stevia extract if you need something to sweeten your tea and really need zero calories.

It does not matter. A tiny packet has 1 gram, or about 3.5 calories.

It does matter, and @tsiivola already said why. You use far less of the artificial sweetener to get the same subjective taste than you do sugar. So while 3.5 grams is the same amount of calories either way, one uses way more than 3.5 grams of sugar.

I wish this site had a decent user block feature as twitter does.

  • -12

Click the three dots on someone's comment and select "Block User". You won''t be notified of replies and their comments (but not the children of their comments) will be hidden from you.

As far as I can tell, that's practically identical to Twitter.

I do read Jim from time to time, but I never got his health advice, given that extreme amounts of butter will eventually cause issues. Actual doctors who do work out like the barbell medicine fellas recommend the use of zero-calorie sweeteners and seed oils.

The comments below are even worse commentary on this by Aidan, a guy whom I cite regularly. For the record, I am not the fittest guy, I just don't think that eating mostly meat and dairy can be good long-term.

Also, has he shared any of his stats (weight, height), before after, etc.? Anyone can give advice, but results are another matter

He did but he is not jacked, he went from fat at 250s to 150 now. Many people do that and on a whole host of different diets. There is an alpha male larp with food habits that he seems to like.

wow that is impressive

Yes but he is trying to paint a picture of things that are not true, I say this as a guy who has a much more positivie view of him than most here

Whats wrong with tea and what is non sweet juice? Do you mean juice that has had its fructose somehow removed or just juice without added sugar? If it's the latter then I don't see the problem, unsweetened juice is still incredibly sweet.

Maybe juice is not the right word... I'm talking about stuff like chicha morada and agua de jamaica, not fruit in a blender.

Aguas frescas without sweeteners? Now I've heard of everything.

Pro-tip- put unsweet tea in the fridge, do yardwork and then drink it as soon as you come inside. That's how you develop a taste for it.

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