When I looked at artificial sweeteners, I had earmarked sucralose as the worst of the bunch. It had been linked to increase in glucose levels, increase in insulin levels, and an 18% increase in insulin resistance. So I ruled it out as a usable sweetener.
I can now confirm that it is in fact evil. A few days ago, my blood sugar stopped making sense. After months of being low and predictable, it suddenly went up and behaved very strangely. For example, it would go up without eating any food, many hours after the last meal. There was no reason for that and it had never happened before. Even my daily average, normally in the upper 90s, shot up to just under 110mg/dl.
Also running didn’t seem to make my glycaemia go down, which didn’t make sense.
To make things worse, even my fasting levels were up. They’re normally between 78mg/dl and 85mg/dl, they were now in the upper 90s. Finally, my weight went up 1.5kg when it had been stable for months. That was not on.
To try to bring things under control, I’ve been restricting my food to salads. These normally barely register in my glycaemia. In fact I’m sometimes lower after a salad than before I eat. In the last few days, they sent me in the 120mg/dl. Again, that made no sense. I was careful not to put anything carby in the salad, and I spiked more than I eat pasta.
It took 2 days to connect the dots. It happens that a few days ago, I started mixing lemon concentrate in my drinks for flavour. It’s now hot, and it’s nice to drink a lemony juice. The bottle said that it had 0 sugar and I had checked the label, and indeed, no carbs, no sugar. It was a green light for me.
However, what I hadn’t considered is what sweetener was used. I normally drink things sweetened with aspartame. I know it doesn’t do anything to me, and doesn’t have significant health effects. So I didn’t think anything of it and didn’t think of checking how the juice was sweetened.
I’ve now stopped drinking that juice, and my numbers are coming down slowly. Fasting glucose was 89mg/dl this morning, the lowest it’s been in days. I expect it will take a few days for the sucralose to leave my system.
The lesson is: don’t eat sucralose and always check the labels.
