On 9 August 2016, I wound up leaving work a bit early, furious that I’d accidentally given myself a histamine reaction from a new tube of lip gloss, and worried that I needed to drive home and take care of it before I felt any worse than I already did.
I took some Benadryl when I got home and let out my anger by writing the blog post “this is life with a sucralose allergy” while I waited for the antihistamines and multiple glasses of water to do their thing. While I listed out all the products I’d had reactions to over the years and described how annoying and painful it was do deal with such a reaction, I also did a lot of Googling and tried to find reputable sources discussing what was apparently a relatively common reaction.
Relatively common because there was a lot of online discussion about it. My own blog post went as near to viral as anything I’ve ever written online. Even today it gets hundreds of hits per week. It’s received far more reactions and far more comments than any post in over ten years of blogging, from people all over the world.
What I found, that day and every day I’ve tried to learn more since, is that officially, sucralose allergies do not exist. I am not a medical professional, and I do encourage anyone having reactions to consult an actual doctor, but in terms of finding literature on the subject, the best result I’ve ever found is a physician’s letter to the American Academy of Allergy Asthma & immunology. The physician says they have had some patients complaining of allergic reactions to both stevia and sucralose (different patients). They have searched for literature, but have not been able to find anything. Could the AAAAI provide guidance?
A doctor associated with the AAAAI writes back, and notes that while stevia allergies are a possibility, they doubt sucralose allergies can exist, since sucralose is simply a sugar molecule with chlorine molecules attached, and therefore, chemically speaking, should not trigger an allergic reaction.
Now then.
If you’ve read my previous blog post on this subject, you might think I would be disappointed to learn that it’s not really an allergy. Instead, though, I was happy to read this, because a) it seemed to come from a reputable source and b) both physicians took the patients’ reports seriously. No matter what the scientific outcome, this seems to me to be the best way to go about it.
It does leave me with a question, though:
If it’s not an allergic reaction, why do I and so many other people react so badly to sucralose? What is happening, chemically and medically, that this reaction occurs even when we don’t know that we’ve consumed something with sucralose in it?
One thing I noticed both in my research and in the comments to my original blog post: the symptoms of the reaction are all over the place. Not just the histamine reaction (hives and water retention) that I get, but blisters, throat swelling, migraines, stomach issues, numbness, and more. I’ve even read a report of an anaphylactic attack, although those show up rarely when people put reaction stories on the net.
Meanwhile, since I last wrote about this, it seems that scientists have now determined that artificial sweeteners may not be good for you, period. They are commonly included to reduce calories (and therefore general weight gain), and to help diabetic people avoid sugar, and they’ve become more popular now that countries like the United Kingdom have created laws around how much sugar can be in some commercially prepared products. Because of this and other market forces, sucralose is expected to only become even more popular. But it’s been discovered that artificial sweeteners may actually be making people glucose intolerant because the body’s gut flora are being altered.
There are still tonnes of articles crowing about how safe sucralose is. So what? So are peanuts if you don’t react to them!
Personally, I’d rather manufacturers simply reduced the amount of sugar in products and outright ditched the artificial sweeteners. To my palette, anyhow, products like fizzy drinks and protein bars are way oversweetened to begin with, and could stand some dialling back. As proof that I’m not the only one, I’d point out the incredible success of completely unsweetened, no-calorie drinks like La Croix. Turns out a lot of people just wanted some fizz and a little bit of flavour, and weren’t looking for something sweet at all.
I’ve been lucky. I haven’t had a single reaction since that last time in August 2016. I’ve managed to achieve that by reading ingredients lists, making as many meals from scratch as possible (I even make my own breakfast cereal some weeks), and having full-sugar items, but less of them (because they’re over-sweet and therefore not entirely pleasant).
It still feels like a lot of people are having their symptoms ignored by science, though. I hope that five years from now, when I write my third post on this topic, that some actual, serious studies have been done.