We have spoken at length about sugars, today we Ask Prof Noakes about artificial sweeteners on the LCHF diet. Are they bad for you, can you have them, what is your take on these sweeteners Prof?

Professor Tim Noakes: I think there may be some artificial sweeteners that are better than others, I think the ones that are more carbohydrate based are probably better. I really haven’t looked into it but the ones that are substitutes and are other forms of chemicals, I’d be very wary about. Because humans were not exposed to those chemicals and we just don’t know what happens.

All we know is that to be healthy we need to be eating the foods that we were eating 500, 600, 14000 years ago. Those are the foods that we were really designed to eat. And if you introduce chemicals that were not around 14000 years ago, you can be in trouble.

Therefore most artificial sweeteners I would think are not so good. The other issue is that for a lot of people, we have a sweetness addiction, and if you keep eating sweet foods and adding artificial sweeteners there is always the risk that you will just go and look for sugary foods again. And the sugar addiction is THE most powerful addiction. It’s much more addictive than cocaine or heroin.

So, in my case – and certainly in the people I have seen who have been morbidly obese and lost weight dramatically – they have a sugar addiction and you have got to take sugar completely out of the diet, and sweet tastes completely out of the diet to be 100% certain you won’t relapse. It’s like cigarette smoking; you cannot smoke one cigarette if you are an addicted cigarette smoker.

In my view it is the same with sugar. If you have ever had a sugar addiction and had trouble regulating your sugar intake, replacing it with sweeteners doesn’t help. Eventually you’re going to start looking for the sweetness again, and you will find it. Something like 90% of processed foods has sugar in it. So you will just go straight back to those foods again in the long term. READ MORE