Nowadays, people more and more care about their health, especially, the food that they eat every day. Not only do they care about the quantity of foods, but also they consider the quality of foods. People confirm the ingredient before they buy products and they usually choose artificial sweeteners over natural sugar. They think artificial sweeteners will not add extra calories to the body and help them to control their weight. However, many health experts doubt the safety of artificial sweeteners after doing research about it. They have discovered several dangerous elements in artificial sweeteners. This paper reports the types of common artificial sweeteners, the reason why they are harmful, their bad influences on the body, and why they are not helpful to control our weight. The first artificial sweetener, saccharin, was discovered in 1879 in America. In the beginning, artificial sweetener was only used by diabetics who couldn’t absorb too much natural sugar (de la Pena, 2010). Since 1980, people have started to use chemical sweeteners to control their weight and improve their health. Suddenly, artificial sweetener products became very popular in the United States (de la Pena, 2010). Millions of Americans use chemical sweeteners instead of natural sugar in order to enhance their health. However, it does not mean that chemical sweeteners are health foods. Actually, they are not. They are not like vitamins, whole grains, or proteins that can contribute to our health (de la Pena, 2010). In fact, investigators found many potential dangers of using artificial sweetener. Sucralose is one kind of chemical sweetener that is used most extensively in the marketing of products such as cakes, cookies, and breads, because it tastes most like sugar (“The Sweet,” 2004). The other common chemical sweetener is Aspartame. It is sweeter than natural sugar by 160 to 220 times and it is usually used in gum. Another familiar one is sugar alcohols which are used in many different beverages (“The Sweet,” 2004). These drinks are marked “sugar-free”, so many people misunderstand the meaning and think that “sugar-free” equals “calorie-free”. In fact, the calorie count of sugar alcohol is about half that of natural sugar (“The Sweet,” 2004). Why are artificial sweeteners harmful? A laboratory mixes several unnatural chemicals to make artificial sweeteners that the human’s body can’t decompose. Therefore, these unnatural things will accumulate in our bodies and infect our blood. Finally, our cells may become mutations (Hull, 2005). For example, you can imagine that our bodies are just like cars, if you put shampoo into the gas tank of the car, the engine will stop moving (Hull, 2005). In addition, sucralose includes chlorine and this chemical substance will make people get cancer. According to much research, chlorine can damage many parts of a human body such as a liver, kidneys, and thymus gland. On the other hand, aspartame will also hurt our bodies. It’s made up of two different amino acids that are linked by methanol. Methanol is a kind of poisonous material that causes mental retardation (Hull, 2005). A new report contends that artificial sweetener may hurt the memory of the brain. They have found out that since artificial sweetener products have become popular, people who have the problem of disruptive memory have been growing (Rebhahn, 2001). Timothy M. Barth, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Texas Christian University, discovered that his students who always drank diet beverages forgot details of their lives easier or whether or not a task had been finished more than nonusers (Rebhahn, 2001). Other research points out that artificial sweeteners have been connected to a beginning increase in premature birth in pregnant women. According to the experiment, investigators discovered that the women who drank one can of diet beverage every day increased the risk of premature birth by 38% more than the women who didn’t drink diet beverages. Furthermore, drinking more than four diet beverages every day increased the risk of giving birth prematurely by 78% (“Should Aspartame”, 2011). The most harmful effect from artificial sweetener is the increased risk of getting cancer. The researchers added aspartame to the food and fed laboratory rats. They separated three groups of rats and fed them aspartame quantities of 2,000, 400, and 0 ppm. In the results, the rats fed at 2,000 ppm showed that the risk of getting cancer increased from 18.7% to 31.4%. 2,000 ppm is equal to a 45-pound kid drinking 5 cans of diet beverage or a 150-pound adult consuming 14 packets of sweetener every day (Mead, 2007). Though this experiment was with rats not people, the investigators believed that this result was considerable. Most people use artificial sweeteners in order to control their weight, but based on new research artificial sweeteners are useful for body weight control. Opposite to general thinking, research has discovered that chemical sweeteners like aspartame can increase your hunger, stimulate carbohydrate cravings, and make weight gain. The researchers found out that foods made with aspartame and the food made with natural sugar are similar in calorie consumption. The reason is when you eat the sweet taste without the calories, it will effects your appetite systems, causing stimulated food desiring (“Artificial Sweeteners” 2013). They also claim that natural sugar makes your body correctly decide that your body gets enough calories, therefore you will not feel hungry. If you eat diet foods, your appetite is stimulated by the sweet flavor, but your body keeps desiring more calories, and you will keep on feeling hungry. Therefore, you feel hungry; you desire sweets, your body saves more fat, and you have an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and more (“Artificial Sweeteners” 2013). In the beginning, artificial sweeteners were only used as a medicinal cure to help diabetics maintain their blood sugar, but nowadays people abuse them in order to make their bodies more healthy. They drink diet sodas of zero calories. People rely on chemical substances to maintain their figures. However, not only can’t artificial sweeteners help you to control your weight, but also artificial sweeteners let you get illnesses.
Facts show that artificial sweeteners consist of different chemical substances that are harmful on our bodies in many ways, such as losing memory, giving birth prematurely, and getting cancer. Although scientists warned people that using artificial sweeteners has potential dangers, many products still advocate that artificial sweeteners are beneficial to health in order to earn money. Don’t be cheated by those exaggerated advertisements, sugar-free is not the same meaning of calorie-free. Therefore, we have to realize how harmful artificial sweeteners have actually been and how they are helpless to improve our health.

References
Should aspartame be banned? (2011, Fall) Herizons, 25(2), 13-13.
Hull, J.S. (2005, February) Artificial sweeteners. Total Health, 27 (1), 30-32.
The sweet and lowdown on sugar substitutes. (2004, October) Environmental Nutrition, 27 (10), 2-2.
Rebhahn, P. (2001, March) Dangerous diet drinks. Psychology Today, 34 (2), 20.
Mead, N. M. (2007, September) Aspartame cancer risk revisited. Environmental Health Perspectives, 115 (9), 460. de la Peña, C. (2010, March) Artificial sweetener as a historical window to culturally situated health. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1190 (1), 159-165.
Artificial sweeteners cause greater weight gain than sugar, yet another study reveals
(2012, April 4). Mercola. Retrieved from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/12/04/saccharin-aspartame-dangers.aspx