I use Splenda because I have reactive hypoglycemia. I’ve had it since my mid-20s. These are my bona fides, so you know I’m not one of those people who read and article, and decided I had hypoglycemia because I get cranky when I’m hungry: I was diagnosed by a doctor after he had me check my blood sugar regularly with a glucometer 5x/day for a month, and confirmed by both a check of A1C, and a glucose tolerance test. (If you don’t want the long story, skip to the arrow.)
If you don’t know, a glucose tolerance test consists fasting for 12 hours, having a baseline blood draw, drinking what tastes like pure glucose, then having 8 blood draws with a finger-stick each time for a glucometer check. After the sixth blood draw, my blood glucose level was 25. 90-100 is normal for a fasting non-diabetic (who was previously eating normally). 0 is dead. Diabetics shoot up as high as 500 sometimes after the glucose drink. I never went higher than 115, and my second draw was already something like 80. Normal non-diabetics can go as high as 140, and come down slowly. They don’t go lower than about 85.
They called my doctor after the sixth draw, and he said the halt the test and send me to the ER for an IV drip with something to raise my blood sugar slowly, and something to eat with complex carbs and protein.
My point is, that my pancreas does not function correctly. Right now, it is sort of doing the opposite of what a diabetic’s would, but that is actually besides the point.
On my father’s side of the family, there is a heritable form of adult-onset (age 50-70) insulin-dependent diabetes. Clinically, it looks just like “juvenile” diabetes, but clearly it isn’t, with a middle age to elderly onset.
The cause appears to be autoimmune. There’s no treatment, other than to manage it as diabetes.
My doctor tells me that I am at especially high risk for it because of the hypoglycemia. A pancreatic malfunction of one manifestation, could come to manifest another way.
–> My point, and I do have one, is that after having reactive hypoclycemia from age 26, or thereabouts, to whatever age I am when my pancreas finally gives up, and I become insulin-dependent, and then live however many years that way, is likely to shave time off whatever potential lifespan my genes bestowed upon me.
Just an illustration of the fact that any group of people using Splenda long-term is probably going to include people with pathologies, so it’s going to be very hard to tease out the effects of Splenda alone.
I will say that if I ate sugar like I eat Splenda, well, I couldn’t. I get terrible symptoms when my blood sugar is low. The chances that I would do something stupid, like kill myself in a car accident with a combination of poor judgment and poor motor control both caused by low blood sugar, and shave a lot more years off of my life than eating Splenda ever would are very real.