We are all trying to be healthy. We are all trying to do what we can to make the right choices for our body, but sometimes we get misinformation about what the right thing is. I was a victim of this misinformation as well. When I first went to chiropractic school, my husband and I decided that we were going to “get healthy.” So what did we do? We cut out as many calories as possible and bought any and everything that said “Diet” on it. We ate mainly processed “diet” things. 
Reduced fat cheese, healthy choice frozen meals, diet drinks, low fat chips etc. Then what happened, because we were only strictly eating diet things, we lost a lot of weight rapidly, but I also started losing my hair, my husband looked sickly, we had no energy and I was getting headaches twice a week. The reason for this is that just because Diet things have few calories, it does not mean they have any nutritional value or that they should even be called food. I got a hair test t o see what was going on with my vitamins and minerals and found out that all of my vitamins and minerals (the building blocks of my cells) were depleted to dangerous levels and that my adrenal glands were no longer working. All of this at age 22! This was a very important lesson for me because it made me realize that “diet” does not mean healthy. Most diet foods have the nutritional value of a cardboard box. In fact I read a study that was done on rats. One group of rats was fed a local brand of cereal and the other was fed the cardboard boxes that it came in. The rats that only ate cardboard lived longer than the rats that ate the cereal!
So what does this have to do with artificial sweeteners? Well here it is, artificial sweeteners
are a chemical that was originally made during WWII as a neurotoxin to kill our enemies. When the company found out the neurotoxin was sweet, they changed a few things and turned it into an artificial sweetener. Artificial sweeteners are a man made chemical, they are not food. And though you may have less calories, they increase your appetite. When you eat something with fake sugar in it, your body thinks it is getting real sugar so it releases a lot of insulin. The insulin doesn’t find the sugar it thought was there so it eats up whatever remaining glucose you have in your bloodstream. This makes you have low blood sugar or become hypoglycemic. When you are hypoglycemic, your brain can’t function optimally because it needs glucose to function. So your brain triggers your body to become very hungry, and hungry for something with a lot of sugar in it. So when you drink a diet drink with toxic chemicals in it because you are trying to reduce your calories, your appetite increases causing you to eat more calories anyway.
Our body is not made to eat manmade chemicals. When your insulin is being released for no purpose and too often, your receptors can burn out, causing type 2 diabetes, but that is another discussion. Don’t be a victim of advertisements. Educate yourself in nutrition!
-Laine Morales D.C., C.M.T.
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