Thanks to my friends at Bariatric Eating's Before and After Help discussion board, I learned today that Splenda has calories and carbs. To be exact, one packet has four calories and one gram of carbohydrate. More starkly, one cup has 96 calories and 24 grams of carbohydrate.
I had no idea.
This information basically makes everything I've said on this blog about my calorie intake a big, fat lie. You can add 40 calories (at least) to every day. I usually take 5 packets of Splenda in each protein shake, and I love the sweet/savory combination so a lot of my other foods have Splenda in them as well. I have a serious sweet tooth and Splenda, I thought, was a miracle drug.
How do they get away with calling this product a "no-calorie sweetener"? According to Splenda's website, it meets the FDA's guidelines for a no-calorie product because of the small amount of calories.
Apparently, it's the dextrose and maltodextrin that they add to the sucralose (the real sweetening agent) for bulk that yields the carbs and calories. See this post from Low Carb Freedom blog for more details. To avoid these additives, you can use a liquid sucralose product like Sweetzfree or EZ-Sweetz. You could also stick with other sugar substitutes, or even a natural product like stevia. I've been told that you can boil the actual stevia leaves and build a sweet syrup to sweeten liquids.
I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I'm quite upset about this.
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