The Common Artificial Sweetener That Can Break Down Your DNA
A science research team reports that Splenda could be damaging our DNA.
Years ago, we’d scoff at the people who warned us that diet sodas might be just as dangerous in their own way as their full-strength counterparts. Now, it looks like many diet sodas and other products really are dangerous because of the artificial sweetener they contain: Splenda. According to Science Alert, a research team has discovered that this sweetener is potentially damaging the very DNA within our cells after we ingest it.
Now, before you freak out too much, you should know that Splenda is potentially damaging your DNA in a very specific and likely very slow way. That means you’re not going to end up looking like that one mutated thug in Robocop, and that’s the good news. The bad news is that those who regularly consume products sweetened by Splenda may be slowly destroying their DNA in a very specific way.
The scientific term for the kind of damage that Splenda could be causing in your body is “genotoxic,” which is a fancy way of saying that the body may experience mutations thanks to changes being made to a person’s DNA. Speaking of fancy terms, the technical term for Splenda is “sucralose,” and a 2018 study on rats revealed that the dangerous compound sucralose-6-acetate was created after rats consumed and then metabolized sucralose.
In short, even if Splenda was perfectly safe to consume on its own (and it’s not: more on this soon), the genotoxic compound created by ingesting and metabolizing it means that it is simply too dangerous to eat.
One thing that should raise the average American’s eyebrows is that Splenda is already being monitored by scientists in adherence with the European Food Safety Authority. And they have determined “a threshold of toxicological concern for all genotoxic substances of 0.15 micrograms per person per day,” meaning you shouldn’t consume more than this amount in a single day. Unfortunately, more bad news for diet soda drinkers: “the trace amounts of sucralose-6-acetate in a single, daily sucralose-sweetened drink exceed that threshold,” and that’s not even counting what happens inside your body after you infest and metabolize the sweetener.
That would mean that any given diet drink and the vast majority of food products that use Splenda should be considered potentially dangerous because they have the capability of damaging our DNA and making our bodies more susceptible to “inflammation, oxidative stress, and cancer.” If that’s not scary enough, researchers also discovered via testing that Splenda could cause a so-called “leaky gut” in which everything from digested food to dangerous toxins could exist the gut and enter into your bloodstream.
While only time will tell if national regulatory agencies put harsher restrictions on Splenda, the research team behind the current study is encouraging everyone to avoid consuming Splenda directly and to avoid consuming any products that were made with it. Certainly, this newer research seems to contradict earlier tests showing that Splenda was relatively safe for consumption, and we can hope the prevailing science leads to a regulatory overhaul. In the meantime, until we can get a guarantee that these DNA changes give us fabulous mutant powers and let us finally join the X-Men, we’re going to put the diet soda down for good.
