If you’re familiar with the television show The Biggest Loser, then you have seen the bullying, screaming, tough as nails trainer Jillian Michaels. But did you know that she does a radio show every Sunday morning? When I found this out, I decided to give it a listen. One of the first shows I listened to, Jillian talked about the dangers of Splenda. She completely trashed it. Said that it wasn’t safe as the manufacturer’s want us to believe. That they claim it’s calorie-free, but that it wasn’t true because what they do is take sugar and wash it in chlorine which causes your body to not absorb the calories. At that point, I looked down at my coffee that was sweetened with-you guessed it-Splenda in disbelief. This couldn’t be true, could it? I mean, I love Jillian, and I’m sure she knows her stuff when it comes to working out, but this just couldn’t be true. So, I decided to do a little digging of my own.

What I found is that experts aren’t really sure if Splenda is safe or not. Some people have side effects and some people don’t. What I do know is that to make Splenda, they take sugar (chemically known as sucrose) and replace parts of it with chlorine atoms (I found this on http://www.womentowomen.com/nutritionandweightloss/splenda.aspx). Now, I’m by no means an expert, and can only give my personal feelings and opinions on this, but did you catch that? Chlorine. Just like Jillian said. According to the article, your digestive system doesn’t recognize it. So, technically, it has calories, but your body just doesn’t absorb those calories.

The more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking about that chlorine. Is that something I want to put into my body? Like the article said, they don’t know if it’s safe, so why would I want to wait until the experts find out if it’s safe? Ok, decision made, I’m going to switch to a natural sugar substitute. Problem. I don’t like any of the ones that I’ve tried so far. I’ve tried Stevia, erythritol, and the new product on the market Truvia (which contains both Stevia and erythritol). I don’t like the aftertaste that Stevia and Truvia leave. And it takes so much erythritol to get my coffee sweet enough for my taste that I might as well just use sugar. The one natural sugar substitue that I haven’t tried is xylitol. I haven’t tried it is because I haven’t been able to find it yet in the area that I live. Yes, yes, I know I can order it online and will probably do so soon, but what if I don’t like it either? I can’t use regular sugar. There are way too many calories in sugar for that. I might as well go to Starbucks every day (hmmm-no, I can’t do that). And I won’t give up coffee. It’s not happening. I mean, soda is one thing I think I can give up(well mostly), but coffee? Nope. I guess the thing to do is to just try the xylitol and see what happens. I’ll keep you posted.