Even I, all those years ago, sometimes longed for the sweet taste of sugar. Now that I’m older and smarter, I never touch it, and I never tell my patients to do so either.

Sugar is so bad, dangerous, and tempting that you should think of it as a biohazard and stay away from it. Too much of this all-too-common “flavor enhancer” helps spread many of the diseases we fear the most, like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. Worse, it’s very easy to get hooked on. It raises blood sugar and insulin levels, makes you gain weight, and stimulates the same parts of the brain as cocaine and heroin. Without a doubt, this is the worst thing that could happen.

Many people are trying to cut sugar out of their diets now that they know how bad it is for them. This is a great trend. If you’re trying to give up sugar, you should be proud of how far you’ve come so far. But there are some things you should know that you might not want to hear. You should also stop using ‘non-nutritive’ fake sweeteners (NNS) to help you stop eating sugar.

Unfortunately, in many ways, all artificial sweeteners are just as bad for you as sugar. Non-nutritive sweets have a number of bad effects, such as making people hungrier, causing them to gain weight, causing mental problems, and even causing brain damage. Some of the signs they might cause by accident are migraines, flatulence, bloating, dizziness, cramps, diarrhea, and skin eruptions.

Artificial sweeteners undermine and kill good gut bacteria

People often think of the saccharin (Sweet’N Low), aspartame (Equal), and sucralose (Splenda) packets in pink, blue, and yellow as non-nutritive sweets. When you eat prepared foods and drinks that are marketed as having little or no sugar or being sugar-free, you may unknowingly be eating or drinking a number of these NNSs.

NNS are sweet, but they also have another, less well-known, and very bad side effect. It turns out that they are very good at getting rid of a lot of good gut bacteria, which are important for keeping your microbiome healthy and, by extension, your overall health.

Even though many integrative practitioners have questioned the use of NNS, especially for gut health, for a long time, an Israeli animal study in 2015 made the theory more popular. The study’s results show that eating artificial sweets may make you more likely to gain weight and get diabetes. This metabolic link has been found in other studies, but the Israeli study was the first to show that NNSs seem to change the population of gut bacteria that help control metabolism in animals. They are likely to hurt the germs that live in our digestive systems in the same way.

In 2017, researchers found that when people drank sucralose, it changed their bacteria, causing inflammation, a leaky gut, and damage to their livers. Intestinal dysbiosis was found to be one of the most important (and bad) side effects of artificial sweets in earlier studies.

Cut off from all the sweet stuff– Our Conclusion

NNS is just one more thing to ignore. All of them are very sweet, and some are even hundreds of times sweeter than sugar. This is another dangerous thing they all have in common. All that fake sweetness overstimulates your taste buds, making them less sensitive and more worn out. This makes you feel sweeter and teaches your body to look for real sugar, but it also makes it harder for your body to absorb sugar when it does come. Is there any way to get off the train of added sugar? Here are some good examples.

Change the way you look at things and maybe grow up a little: Remember to stay away from things that are high in sugar. You don’t need this bad habit, so you can stop doing it. Like a bad relationship, it’s over, and it’s time to move on.
Make a sugar-removal strategy: You can stop taking it slowly and regularly over time, or you can stop all at once if you prefer. If you are careful, you can slowly cut back on how much you eat every day. If you usually put one packet of sugar in your iced tea, you might want to cut back slowly over a few days so your taste buds can get used to the new, natural taste.

Taste better without putting your health at risk: Try extracts and spices like vanilla, almond, chocolate, coriander, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, pepper, anise, fennel, and others instead of sugar to improve the taste.
Don’t go too far with the thing itself: Use raw, unprocessed honey, a few home-made stevia leaves, monk fruit (lu han guo fruit essence), or crushed mint leaves instead of sugar and NNS. But keep in mind that you need to be very gentle.
Get ahead of the race by taking 1000–2000 mg of L-glutamine every few hours if you’re very addicted to sugar and can’t control your cravings.