“Is there a place in a healthy diet for ‘sugar-free’ products?”

You may’ve decided that you want to stick with your plan to lose some pounds, and as a result, you’ve chosen to go with one of the many ‘diet’ foods out there on the market. You may’ve noticed that coincidentally, when you added any one of the fake sugars to your diet, that you started to feel ‘off’. While this doesn’t happen to everyone who eats these engineered products, don’t be surprised if your digestion is simply not as normal as it used to be before you added these things in!

To put it simply, some of the fake sugars are just not recognized or digested by the human GI tract. So, as a result, they can literally sit there and fester in the intestine, causing bloating, gas, pain and digestive disturbance, to name just a few possible side effects! Add to that the fact that some of the fake sugars have been shown to increase rates of certain cancers and cause headaches, and you’ve got a really appealing ingredient in your ‘food’!

I’ve always preferred the approach of having the ‘real thing’, just less often and not as much! For example, if you LOVE chocolate (as I do!), having a small, 1/2 oz peice of premium dark chocolate after dinner is much more satisfying that having a serving of some pretend, diluted, fake-sugar added dessert!

Having a ‘treat’ less often also makes it more enjoyable and special. From a nutritional standpoint, we do not ‘need’ dessert, and we should plan our diet accordingly. Again, have a small piece of the real version of whatever your ‘treat’ of choice may be, once in a while, and you’ll be able to find room to accommodate one or two hundred extra calories in your diet over the course of a week, much more easily than trying to fit them in every day!