A scientific research team reports that Splenda can damage our DNA.
Years ago, we scoffed at people who warned us that diet sodas might be just as dangerous in their own way as their full-fat counterparts. Now it appears that many diet sodas and other products are indeed dangerous because of the artificial sweetener they contain: Splenda. According to Learned signala research team discovered that this sweetener potentially damages the very DNA in our cells after we ingest it.
Now, before you get too worked up, you should know that Splenda potentially damages your DNA in a very specific and possibly very slow way. This means you won’t look like that mutated thug Robocop, and that’s the good news. The bad news is that those who regularly consume products sweetened with Splenda may be slowly destroying their DNA in a very specific way.
The scientific term for the type of damage Splenda can do to your body is “genotoxic,” which is a fancy way of saying that the body can undergo mutations due to the changes made to a person’s DNA. Speaking of fancy terms, the technical term for Splenda is “sucralose,” and a 2018 study in rats revealed that the dangerous compound sucralose-6-acetate was created after rats consumed and then metabolized sucralose. In short, even if Splenda were perfectly safe to consume on its own (and it isn’t: more on that shortly), the genotoxic compound created by ingesting and metabolizing it means it’s simply too dangerous to eat.
One thing that should raise the eyebrows of the average American is that Splenda is now being monitored by scientists in accordance with the European Food Safety Authority. And they’ve set a “threshold of toxicological concern for all genotoxic substances of 0.15 micrograms per person per day,” meaning you shouldn’t consume more than that amount in a day. Unfortunately, more bad news for diet soda drinkers: “traces of sucralose-6-acetate in a daily sucralose-sweetened beverage exceed this threshold,” and that’s not even counting what happens in your body after you ingest and metabolize a sweetener.
This would mean that any given diet drink and most food products that use Splenda should be considered potentially dangerous because it has the ability to damage our DNA and make our bodies more susceptible to “inflammatory, oxidative stress and cancer’. If that wasn’t scary enough, researchers also found through testing that Splenda can cause what’s known as “leaky gut,” where everything from digested food to dangerous toxins can exist in your intestines and enter your bloodstream.
Although only time will tell if national regulatory agencies impose stricter restrictions on Splenda, the research team behind the current study encourages everyone to avoid consuming Splenda directly and avoid consuming products made with it. Of course, this newer research seems to contradict earlier tests showing that Splenda is relatively safe to consume, and we can hope that the prevailing science will lead to regulatory change. In the meantime, until we can get a guarantee that these DNA changes give us incredible mutant powers and allow us to finally join the X-Men, we’ll be giving up diet sodas forever.