Today’s post begins with some bad news (but keep reading—I promise there’s good news to follow!). Recent research indicates that women who drink sweetened beverages may raise their risk of heart disease, even if the drinks don’t cause them to gain weight. Apparently, sipping sweet drinks raises your triglycerides (a type of cholesterol) and messes with your blood sugar levels, potentially raising your risk of developing diabetes. And of course, the more you drink, the worse the problem is. But you don’t have to quit your coffee/soda/sweet tea habit cold turkey. In fact, you can pare down the sweet stuff relatively painlessly. Here’s how.
The key is to make changes slowly, but you have several options. You can try gradually downsizing your drink, cutting back on the number of drinks per day, and/or reducing the amount of sweetener added. This is easy to do if you’re making your own drink, but you can ask for adjustments if you’re ordering a beverage too. Many coffee shops, for instance, use multiple pumps of flavored syrups—ask how many they usually use to make your drink, and request one fewer. Once your taste buds adjust (it can take a few weeks), ask your barista to eliminate another pump, until you’re as low as your palate can go. For sweet tea, ask your server to blend some unsweetened tea into your cup, increasing the proportion as you get used to the taste. You can do the same at the soda fountain with regular and diet sodas.
I don’t generally recommend that people switch to artificial sweeteners because their health risks are widely debated—for every study that says they’re safe, there’s a study linking them to everything from DNA damage to headaches to, possibly, cancer. And even Splenda (sucralose), which appears to be the safest of the bunch, might reduce good bacteria in your gut and interfere with your ability to absorb oral medications (see the animal study here; researchers don’t know yet if the results translate to people). I’m also concerned that Splenda is relatively new to the market, so we have no way of knowing what the long-term health effects might be.
Better choices include stevia or unrefined sweeteners like agave, barley malt syrup, or brown rice syrup (read more about these in an article I wrote for Dr. Andrew Weil’s Self Healing newsletter). You can also slow sugar’s absorption into your bloodstream and diminish some of the negative effects if you consume it with food that contains protein and/or healthy fats, like a handful of nuts or lowfat yogurt. See—good news as promised!
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