I’ve been asked by some marketers to comment on different sweetener types and their place in the program.
First off, the single purpose of Silhouette Solution Products is to help people break the hypercaloric habits of a lifetime. Research studies show clearly that reductions in weight of as little as 10% bring significant health benefits. Our purpose is to help people achieve at least that, and show them how to keep it off for a lifetime. This is something we can collectively accomplish. As someone who struggled with weight for close to a decade, I know how good it feels to get it done. I also know the other benefits: my cholesterol normalized, blood pressure normalized, energy levels skyrocketed, and much more.
The benefits of all this are, at the end of the day, unequivocally greater than the use of some different sweetener types to get our calibrations in range. Let me explain a little further: pretty much everything we do in IH is about calibration – we calibrate micronutrients according to metabolic testing to create Custom Essentials. Now, we’re calibrating macronutrients to help people lose weight while still getting to eat lots of tasty food. The calibration issue in weight management is a direct and specific response to the intentional mis-calibration of food in the marketplace. There, the cheapest possible ingredients (made cheap by us all through taxpayer-funded agricultural subsidies) are combined in ways that are metabolically addictive, hunger-creating and weight-gaining. And thus begins the vicious cycle.
We therefore set out to re-calibrate foods to be more in keeping with what the body needs, and to work in opposition to all the carb-laden junk out there. One of the most important things we needed to do was put a stop to the blood sugar/insulin cycles that pack on fat, especially around the middle, and flip the metabolic switch in the other direction. In order to accomplish the specific calibrations I specified, our formulary had to do some pretty fancy footwork. High quality protein is a much more expensive ingredient than carbs (which is why everything “out there” is loaded with carbs, not protein), and we also wanted to keep the carbs super-low, so we turned to a variety of sources for that.
I’ll spend more time talking about these in a future, more detailed piece, but suffice it to say that we settled on the several manufactured sweeteners in addition to the natural sweeteners that form the bulk of what we use. In fact, the sweetener used in greatest concentration in our products is FOS – or fructooligosaccharides – typically derived from chicory and with a good, broad profile. It also has a high fiber content, and is one of the favored foods of GI bacteria. Other natural sweeteners we used include organic cane sugar, apple juice concentrate, fructose and glucose. To round out the flavor profile, we are also using “pixie sprinklings” of maltitol, a sugar alcohol derived from starch, sucralose (aka Splenda), and in one product, a tiny bit of acesulfame-potassium. In the QuikStik products, sucralose was the only ingredient our formulary could find (short of loading them with simple carbs) that would mask the back end of the very strong botanicals in there, whose natural flavors are not palatable to the majority of consumers. Once again, the benefit of weight loss is much greater than the temporary consumption of a tiny bit of artificial sweetener!! We’re a pragmatic company, not a purist one, and it’s important to stress that most people out there are gulping down all kinds of junk, multiple times a day. For them, this is a colossal improvement. For purists, perhaps not. In my view, anyone who is overweight needs to be handling that first, using whatever works, then making tiny steps, one at a time, to “clean everything up.”
The formulary is working hard to be able to calibrate all of our products using as many natural ingredients as they can – and we’ll be looking next at whether the new Stevia-based sweetener, Rebiana, might be useful for us when it is released for bulk manufacturing later this year. We’re considering using that in combination with erythritol for some applications, but that is at the very least some months away, and we wanted to be able to offer something to the population NOW. People need what we have – and it WORKS!!
