Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky (2012) and from the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College (2016). In 2023, she was awarded The Edinburgh Medal (for science and society).
We do love sweet foods. Alas, sugars have calories but nothing else of nutritional value and they are associated with poor health.
What are the poor makers of sugary foods and beverages to do? Here are some recent approaches:
- Are sweeteners leaving a sour taste with consumers? An ingredient developed from coca, considered amongst the most illicit and stigmatised plants on the planet, can cut sugar in beverages by up to 40%. Read more.
- Roquette and Bonumose team up to enhance scalability of tagatose, a rare sugar with 92% of the sweetness of sugar, and 38% of the calories: Bonumose has patented a low-cost production method it claims could catapult rare sugar tagatose from a niche to a mainstream sweetener…Tagatose does not raise blood glucose levels when consumed on its own and is Ketogenic Certified. Discover more.
- Are sweeteners good or bad for the planet? Research suggests some could be more harmful to the environment than others… Read more.
And then there are the safety questions.
But questions about sugar substitutes have been swirling for decades, with scientists and public health officials suggesting they might come with certain health risks of their own. The research on how sugar substitutes affect our bodies is preliminary, complex and sometimes contradictory.
…But longer-term studies on sugar substitutes have found no weight loss benefits, and even some harms. For this reason, the World Health Organization recommended in 2023 that people avoid using sugar substitutes for weight control or better health, citing research that linked them to greater risks of health concerns like Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and earlier death. The sugar alcohols erythritol and xylito
l have also been associated with a greater risk of heart attack and stroke.
What to do? For me this is easy.
- I don’t like the way they taste.
- They are a marker of ultra-processed foods.
- I don’t eat anything artificial if I can avoid it.
How harmful are they? I don’t know for sure but would prefer not to be a guinea pig.
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