Between the salt shaker and the napkins sits a box jammed with little coloured packets. Thinking I'll dodge a few kilojoules, I dump one into my coffee. If you do the same every morning or slurp down a Diet Coke at midday, welcome to the club. About 66 per cent of Aussies are sweet on artificial sweeteners, with around 51 per cent consuming them via diet soft drinks, according to Food Standards Australia New Zealand. But while the three biggies - saccharin, aspartame and sucralose - hardly contain any kilojoules, one glance at Australia's collective flab makes you wonder...

What exactly is in those packets and jars?

In the case of Sugarine it's saccharin. Your granny's sugar substitute, saccharin, was discovered in 1879 and is the result of a chemical reaction that produces methyl anthranilate (yum!). It contains just 0.05kJ per teaspoon versus sugar's 63, yet it's 300 times sweeter than the natural stuff. The downside of saccharin, used in products like Diet Pepsi and even some toothpastes, is obvious: it has a bitter, chemical aftertaste.

Equal, the most well-known sweetener, contains the less bitter-tasting aspartame, which is derived from the amino acids L-aspartic acid and L-phenylalanine.

On cafe tables and in diet foods since 1981, aspartme contains 101kJ per teaspoon. But because it's 180 times sweeter than sugar, a little goes a long way: a can of Diet Coke supplies less than 4kJ from aspartame, while the high-fructose corn syrup in normal Coca-Cola packs 420kJ. NutraSweet also contains aspartame, while Hermesetas uses a blend of aspartame and sweetening agent Acesulphame K.

In the yellow packet is Splenda, which gets its sweetness from sucralose. As it says on the label, sucralose - which has been around since 1998 and found in ice-cream, sauces and jellies - is made from real sugar and tastes the closest to the real thing. To create it, food scientists substitute chlorine atoms for three hydrogen-oxygen groups on the sucrose molecule. That makes Splenda a tongue-tingling 600 times sweeter than sugar.


As the obesity epidemic rages, scientists continue to search for the perfect sugar substitute. But recent media hype questions whether these chemical concoctions can really be healthy. A few studies in the '70s linked saccharin to higher rates of cancer in rats, and in 2005 the European Ramazzini Foundation found similar results when rats were fed aspartame. But this research has failed to stand up to scientific testing and there's little evidence that artificial sweeteners cause problems in humans. One exception: a 2001 study in the journal Headache found aspartame can trigger head pain. Experts believe the phenylalanine in aspartame has a negative impact on neurotransmitters. So, if you're headache prone, dodge foods containing aspartame or phenylalanine.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand established the amount of sugar substitutes you can have daily over a lifetime without any appreciable health risk. "To reach the Acceptable Daily Intake for aspartame, someone weighing 70kg would need to consume 2.8g a day - equal to about 20 cans of diet soft drink or more than 100 standard 1g packets of sweetener," says WH's nutrition expert Sharon Natoli.

OK, so faux sugars probably won't do you serious harm. And they look even better when you consider the problems sugar can cause. If you get more than 15 per cent of your kilojoules from food and drinks with added sugar (versus naturally sweet foods like fruit), you up your chance of mood swings, cavities, even grogginess - a study in Human Psychopharmacology found that downing a drink with 42g of sugar left subjects sleepier than if they hadn't had any sugar. And, of course, too much sugar can result in excess kilos. Overindulging causes sharp increases in blood sugar, triggering the release of the hormone insulin, which may encourage the body to store fat.

Artificial sweeteners don't cause blood sugar spikes but there is a downside to this, and they don't necessarily lead to great stomachs. A Harvard Medical School study did show that aspartame helped women maintain weight loss over time by helping them cut kilojoules, but a 2004 study in the International Journal of Obesity suggests that when we offer our bodies sweet diet drinks without the kilojoules, they crave real sugar even more.

There's also no proof that substitutes reduce the risk of diabetes, says Ann Fittante, author of The Sugar Solution ($45, Pan Macmillan). That's likely because people who consume artificial sweeteners often eat a lot of sugar as well. You know - you "save" 420kJ by drinking Diet Coke so you can have a Tim Tam.

The bottom line: most nutritionists agree you'll be healthier and more satisfied eating a bit of post-lunch chockie than feasting on artificially sweetened foods all day. And when you have coffee, remember that sugar delivers just 63kJ a tablespoon, which you can burn by sleeping for only 13 minutes. Pass the sugar, please.