I had the obligatory withdrawal headache last night. I’d been waiting for it. Anybody who’s ever gone cold turkey on sugar or coffee (in my case, both) probably knows about it. It’s this dull pain that just hangs on for hours, a headache that seems to extend down into the back of your neck. You can’t even lie on a pillow comfortably, but the only hope of getting rid of it is to sleep it off. Which I did, finally.
I feel good this morning! Whoo-hoo! Not as alert as I might with coffee, but all-in-all not too bad.
Someone in the comments suggested I try a sugar substitute, rather than giving up coffee because I was giving up sweetened creamer, and I started to explain in a reply comment my feelings about sugar substitutes. I couldn’t find a short way of explaining without sounding like a luddite, so I thought I’d go into it here. So:
I was one of those unhappy few able to taste something other than sweet in the early artificial sweeteners. Overlaid on the sweet taste, for me, was something bitter. One of them also created a strange tactile sensation in my mouth which I can only describe — inadequately — as “slicky.” So I tried and rejected all of them, and I’m still not very interested, despite the fact that new ones have come along since then.
When I was younger, I didn’t see the point of artificial sweeteners. I mean, hey, there was sugar, right? The GOOD stuff. If you didn’t want so much sugar in your diet, just cut down on the sugar. It made sense at the time.
Okay, here’s the maybe-luddite stuff. If you were testing some new chemical for possible harmful effects, you might swab it in concentrated form onto the skin of rats for months or years. Or feed it to them in concentrated form. Or find some way to test it for harmful reproductive effects. Anyway, the basic idea is to apply it day after day for long periods of time, and observe the effects.
Some years back, I noticed the skin of my underarms was … changing. The texture was very slightly different. The color was very slightly different. It suddenly occurred to me that by using an anti-perspirant daily, swabbing it religiously on my pits day after day after day, I was performing that same experiment on myself. I stopped using it. And the skin went back to normal. It wasn’t galloping brain cancer with projective vomiting and blood leaking out of my ears. But it was something, and I didn’t like it. I’d rather have my pits the way they were.
Understand me: I’m not exactly saying anti-perspirants are bad. I’m saying for any one particular person, ANYTHING might be bad. Your own particular chemistry might react to it in some noticeable way.
I’m one of the lucky ones who has no allergies. As a kid, I was immune even to poison ivy. But as I’ve grown older and gotten more tuned in to my internal chorus, I have noticed certain … sensitivities. MSG in Oriental food gives me a mild but hours-long headache, for instance.
As for sweeteners, two things make me less than comfortable with them. One is this “apply for long periods of time” experiment. Sure, the makers will tell you they’re totally safe. But they say that about everything … until they’re forced to take it back. (Oh, but the corporations are our friends! Aren’t they? And the government will protect us! Won’t it? And if all else fails, we can sue the bastards! Can’t we? Well.)
It seems to me that if a species grows up over evolutionary time consuming a particular necessary compound, say some particular sugar, but you then introduce a slightly different compound tinkered up for the same apparent effect, you can’t really know what the side effects will be.
Everything has side effects. Everything. You just can’t tease out a single effect and guarantee that whatever product you’re offering has only that one. It will inevitably have others, some of which are unexpectedly good (Viagra), others which are unexpectedly bad (Thalidomide). You can’t even have great, wonderful, satisfying SEX without the unfortunate side effect of this clingy person suddenly in your life expecting you to tell her you love her all the time, and go on walks and stuff with her. (Juuuuust kidding.)
The side effects can be tolerable. If you have a medicine that fixes your loss of balance but gives you a mild headache, maybe it’s worth it to you to have a constant slight headache in order to be able to walk around. But the question we’re never encouraged to examine, in corporate America, is tolerable to who?
Side effects that are tolerable to a corporation, which sees things in terms of profits and lawsuits, or to a government oversight agency that sees things in statistical terms and views a certain number of deaths as “minimal,” might not be tolerable to me personally, who has to view the possibility of the side effect of death in a whole different light.
I’m neither a biologist nor chemist, but I am somebody in charge of a human life – my own. I prefer to make my own mistakes, rather than borrow someone else’s.
In the end, we’re talking about the General versus the Specific. Generally, to the larger population, fake sweeteners might be good. Specifically, to me, or to any one particular person, they might be bad.
Until I have more data — say, a hundred years or so of it — it’s easier for me to just cut out the sugar and not switch to one of these dubious substitutes.