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  • 240 needles in 20 days to measure blood sugar, can sugar-free drinks really help you lose weight?
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240 needles in 20 days to measure blood sugar, can sugar-free drinks really help you lose weight?

Andrew 06/23/2022 9 min read

These are not unique examples. Among the 18 “sugar-free beverages” submitted for inspection, even if the errors are fully considered, the actual measured results and the nominal ingredient list are not very different.only three.

Is it possible that the dazzling and popular “sugar-free drinks” on the market are actually abig scam?

Don’t worry, the Huang Family Laboratory will give you an analysis slowly.

For a long time, sugar-free drinks have been controversial. For example, sugar-free drinks areIQ tax, unhealthy, unhelpful for weight loss, etc., There are quite a lot of people who think that sugar-free drinks have no taste at all, and they are not happy water.

We bought 18 types of sugar-free drinks and 6 types of sugar-sweetened drinks. In order to avoid detection errors caused by some reasons, we opened them all, packed them into 300 sample bottles, and sent them in the form of blind samples. In the laboratory, the ingredients of these drinks were measured.

In this episode, we are going toIngredients, Efficacy, Safety, TasteFour aspects to discuss with you: everything about sugar-free drinks.

Element

Is the “sugar-free” of sugar-free drinks a lie?

In 1879, a chemist studying coal tar derivatives, Konstantin Falberg, did not wash his hands after the experiment and started cooking directly, and accidentally discovered the first synthetic sugar substitute in human history——saccharin.

Today’s diet drinks rarely use saccharin, but most often add its successor, such asAspartame, Sucralose, commonly known as “artificial sweeteners”, international brands like sugar-free Coke, Sprite, Fanta, all use artificial sweeteners as sugar substitutes.

These sugar substitutes are generally hundreds of times sweeter than sucrose, and with just a little added, a bottle of beverage is sweet enough and won’t give you many calories. In theory, only sugar-free beverages made entirely from them have the confidence to advertise themselves“Zero Carb” “Zero Calorie”.

Another major category of sugar substitutes issugar alcohol, such as erythritol, domestic brands mostly use sugar alcohols, and 11 of our 18 sugar-free options have added erythritol.

The sweetness of sugar alcohol is not as high as that of sucrose, so it needs to be added in large quantities to provide sufficient sweetness, but it has low calories, and most of the intake will be directly excreted in the urine, so it is still a good sugar substitute.

The problem is that this principle is too complicated, not to mention that consumers may not be assured if it is explained. Therefore, the countermeasures of most manufacturers are based on the original National Health and Family Planning Commission issued on February 26, 2014“General Rules for Nutrition Labelling of Prepackaged Foods” (GB 28050-2011) Questions and Answers (Revised Edition)There is a sentence in it: “The recommended energy coefficient of erythritol is 0 kJ/g”, which is directly marked as zero on the packaging.

Seems plausible? However, this question and answer is not very policy-enforced, nor does it specifically define the ingredients commonly found in sugar substitute products. Therefore, manufacturers are often selective in implementation, complying with what is beneficial to them; pretending not to see what is not good for them.

For example,Are sugar alcohols carbs?? It can be counted, or it can be counted. In our selection, we use similar ingredients, which are also nominally 0 calories. Yuanqi Forest, Hey Tea, and Wanglaoji sugar-free herbal tea indicate the existence of carbohydrates. Master Kong sugar-free iced black tea and Sugar Free Pulse is nominally 0 carbs.

For another example, it is clearly mentioned in the “Q&A” that products with nominal dietary fiber, including indigestible oligosaccharides, indigestible starch, resistant dextrin, etc., are8kJ/g converted heat, but in our selection, there are obviously several products that advertise that they have added dietary fiber, which is beneficial to health, and at the same time, it is not converted into calories.

Therefore, we do not deliberately criticize those products whose claims are different from the actual measurement results. Before the official introduction of national mandatory standards, they were the mainstream of the industry. “Sugar-free” is really sugar-free. We basically did not detect the sugar added by the manufacturer without permission, but their publicity is reallynot count, can’t stand the truth.

What is more worthy of being named here is a small group of “honest people” whose stated ingredients are consistent with the actual measurements. They are: Qiulin Dabai Pear, Sugar-Free Magic Claw and Sugar-Free Pepsi. That’s right, in this round of Delicious and Pepsi, Pepsi won!

In addition to the confusion of the nominal ingredients, the use of sugar alcohols has another risk: sugar alcohols are the products of glucose and maltose processing, and the process control is not good enough, which may makesugar free to sugar.

In our selection, there are two detected problems: Wanglaoji sugar-free herbal tea and Bingfeng sugar-free, both of which were detected to contain maltose. According to the national standard (“General Rules for Nutrition Labeling of Prepackaged Foods in National Food Safety Standard” (GB28050-2011)), “sugar-free” means that the sugar content of every 100 grams or 100 milliliters of food is not higher than 0.5 grams, and their content Levels no longer count as “sugar-free.” Out of prudence, we arranged another round of retesting for these two selections. The results of the retesting were all within the national standard “sugar-free” limit.relatively accidentalThe phenomenon.

I believe that this is not the intention of the manufacturer. I hope they can effectively improve the process after seeing this program, and such omissions will not occur again.

In general, sugar-free beverages using artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose are indeed close to zero calories. In this type of selection, the sugar-free Sprite with the highest calorie detection is only 49 kJ/100ml, mostly because it has added dietary fiber.

With diet drinks that use sugar alcohols, the situation is complicated. Their nominal heat is not equal to the heat detected by the laboratory; and the heat detected by the laboratory is not equal to the heat that the human body will metabolize and absorb. It seems that measuring just one ingredient is not convincing enough, so we designed another experiment: the “sugar-free” efficacy test of sugar-free beverages.

effect

To do this experiment, five healthy volunteers with normal blood sugar were needed. Every morning, in the fasting state, they were punctured first to measure the blood sugar concentration; then they drank 500 ml of beverages, and they were punctured half an hour later to measure the changes in blood sugar concentration. In order to reduce the error, each drink must be tested by three people, and the average value is taken as the final score.

It took a whole test20 days, each colleague suffered back and forth40 pins.

Because it is a soil test and the number of samples is too small, the results we obtained are for reference only.

Compared with the sugar-sweetened beverage group, the “sugar-free” effect of the sugar-free beverage group is still very obvious, and everyone can basically trust the “sugar-free beverages” on the market.

But we also found such a wonderful sugary drink: Dayao Chengnuo. It uses artificial sweeteners and white sugar to taste at the same time. The sugar content is 2.6g/100ml, which is obviously beyond the “sugar-free” limit of the national standard. It looks more like a “sugar-free drink”.

Of course, our experiment only measured the sugar-raising effect of the beverage itself, and did not take into account changes in people’s appetite. And this is the biggest concern of dieters about sugar-free drinks. I believe many people have heard of it:Drinking sugar-free drinks will affect people’s insulin secretion, resulting in a strong appetite, but instead eat more and get fatter. Is this statement plausible?

The first thing to admit is that this is not complete nonsense, it is based on aInsulin cephalic releaseThe phenomenon refers to the early release of a small amount of insulin due to sight, taste, smell, or chewing and swallowing actions before sugar enters the bloodstream.

Many studies have observed glucose-stimulated insulin cephalic release, and it is more clear that it is due to taste stimulation: for example, taking sucralose will increase insulin levels. But bypassing the mouth and injecting sucralose directly into the stomach will not; for example, just gargling with saccharin solution will also cause insulin to rise. But not all sugar substitutes have this phenomenon, aspartame research is an exception.

Also, the brief release of insulin, along with increased appetite to eat more,Can’t directly equate. There are indeed papers that have proved through randomized cross-over trials that beverages containing sucralose may increase food cravings in obese women and cannot play a role in weight loss.

But more papers still argue that consuming non-nutritive sweeteners does not increase energy intake levels, which means that it does not stimulate you to eat more because of insulin secretion.

In fact, even if I accept the judgment that “sugar-free drinks” stimulate appetite,It is also still suitable for people who are losing weight. Because all the studies mentioned above are based on the comparison results of the “blank control group”, the “blank control group” in the experiment refers to pureclean water. And do we drink “sugar-free drinks” to replace pure water?

In reality, sugar-sweetened beverages replaced by sugar-free beverages are related to obesity and chronic diseases. It has long been a scientific fact. Just talking about stimulating insulin secretion and promoting appetite is definitely the real sugar that can increase your blood sugar level, which is much more ruthless than sugar substitutes.

However, when it comes to the correlation with diseases, you may have heard a lot of claims that sugar-free drinks are carcinogenic and are harmful to health. Is that true?

Safety

We tried to collect allegations of sugar substitutes on the Internet:Obesity, lymphoma, leukemia, bladder cancer, brain cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, autism and systemic lupus erythematosus are all ‘likely related’.

But none of these allegations are based on rigorous toxicology or carcinogenicity studies. In contrast, every approved use of sugar substitutes is accompanied byNumerous safety studiesAs a basis, for example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that sucralose was safe to use after reviewing data from more than 110 human and animal tests. More than 20 kinds of artificial sugar substitutes approved by my country’s food and drug administration are also based on years of safety research.

It’s not entirely without noteworthy points:Sucralose heated to above 120℃ may decompose to produce substances harmful to human body; Patients with rare disease phenylketonuria should not eat foods containing aspartame; excessive intake of sugar alcohols can cause diarrhea, abdominal distension and other symptoms. The average diet drink consumer should be unlikely to touch these issues.

taste

Which sugar-free drink is better?

Finally, we also arranged a blind test drinking session to compare the taste of these drinks.

In this session, divide all beverages into three groups. The first group contains 5 tea beverages, the second group is 14 carbonated beverages, and the remaining 5 are not easy to classify, they are all included in the third group. Then I invited 8 colleagues who usually “drink without leaving their hands” to serve as tasters to rate these drinks.

It’s interesting to say that several products that performed amazingly in the previous test fell down in this round. The most typical is Qiulin Dabai Pear, which was generally negatively rated by drinkers, and got the lowest score among all beverages. The main problem is the obvious “industrial feeling” and “flavor and flavor”, which will “stick in the mouth” after drinking. “.

Dayao Chengnuo scores are not too high, and the evaluation is very polarized. The older post-80s colleagues like it and say that drinking it as a child; the younger post-00s colleagues dislike its “50 cents orange water taste”. . –·-

The famous vitality forest was defeated by “too much energy”, which overshadowed the original taste of the drink.

In terms of high-scoring products, Sunshine Lemon Black Tea, Sugar-Free Fanta, and Sugar-Free Magic Claw have all received universal acclaim; Pepsi and Delicious are the CPs, and Pepsi won by a slight advantage.

The most surprising is “coconut sugar-free coconut milk”. This peculiar drink, known as “freshly squeezed fresh coconut meat” but claimed to be zero-carb water, originally made the drinkers “full of prejudice” against it, but it actually tasted close to the traditional sugary coconut milk, “almost Can’t drink the difference”, got a high score in the reversal.

We sent for inspection of all the products in the video at our own expense, and compiled a “Comparative Ingredient List of 18 Sugar-Free Beverages”. You can get this reference by replying to the keyword “sugar-free beverage” on the WeChat public account “Huangjia Review”.

The above is the entire content of this episode. With a hard-core attitude, we will do a well-informed evaluation. This is the Huangjia Laboratory. A group of professional, interesting and serious friends are waiting for you.

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