Being diabetic, I tend to stay away from sweet stuff. Artificial sweeteners (though pushed as "safe substitutes" for people with sugar issues) tend to be passed by the FDA without being properly tested, or tested by the manufacturer only (as do many things).
Most artificial sweeteners (aspartame, etc.) actually break down into formaldahyde in the body. You know what formaldahyde is... that chemical they fill dead bodies with to keep them from decomposing... yeah, ew.
They may not have any calories, but they don't help you lose weight. Actually, a lot of people who ingest only "diet" food/drinks tend to gain weight, or at best remain the same no matter how hard they try to lose it.
So I tend stick to natural alternatives, and stay away from anything man-made (which is a good rule of thumb in most cases anyway...)
But I did some research for you and found this...
http://www.holisticmed.com/splenda/splendud.pdf
Excerpt:
Sucralose (aka Splenda) is an artificial sweetener. It actually averages at 600 times sweeter than sugar
Few human studies of safety have actually been published on sucralose. One small
study of diabetic patients using the chlorinated artificial sweetener showed a statistically
significant increase in glycosylated hemoglobin (HgbA1c), which is a marker of longterm
blood glucose levels, and it is used to assess long-term glycemic control in diabetic
patients. According to the FDA, "increases in glycosolation in hemoglobin imply
lessening of control of diabetes.”4 This fact alone should give us pause, because so many
of us are either already diabetic, or right on the verge of becoming so.
Research in animals has shown that sucralose can cause many problems in rats, mice,
and rabbits, such as:
Shrunken thymus glands (up to 40% shrinkage)
Enlarged liver and kidneys
Atrophy of lymph follicles in the spleen and thymus
Increased cecal weight
Reduced growth rate
Decreased red blood cell count
Hyperplasia of the pelvis
Extension of the pregnancy period
Aborted pregnancy
Decreased fetal body weights and placental weights
Diarrhea
According to one source, concerning the significant reduction in size of the thymus
gland, "the manufacturer claimed that the sucralose was unpleasant for the rodents to eat
in large doses and that starvation caused the shrunken thymus glands.”5
The Toxicologist Judith Bellin reviewed studies on rats starved under experimental
conditions, and concluded that their growth rate could be reduced by as much as a third
without the thymus losing a significant amount of weight (less than 7 percent). The
changes were much more marked in rats that were fed sucralose. While the animals' growth rate was reduced by between 7 and 20 percent, their thymuses shrank by as much
as 40 percent.6
A compound chemically related to sucrose, 6-chloro-deoxyglucose, is known to have
anti-fertility and neurotoxic effects, although animal studies of sucralose have not shown
these effects.7
According to the FDA's "Final Rule" report, "Sucralose was weakly mutagenic in a
mouse lymphoma mutation assay." The FDA also reported many other tests as having "inconclusive" results. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want anyone I care about to be
consuming a “weakly mutagenic” artificial sweetener.
