Low- and no-calorie sweeteners can be useful tools for reducing added sugar, carbohydrates and calories while still allowing you to enjoy sweet foods and drinks. Common examples include aspartame, sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame potassium (Ace-K), saccharin, stevia and monk fruit.

You don’t need to avoid these sweeteners to be successful with MacroRx+.

Sweeteners that are approved or recognized as safe for use in foods have established safety standards, and normal consumption within those limits is not the same thing as the extremely high doses sometimes used in laboratory or animal studies.

At the same time, replacing sugar with a low-calorie sweetener doesn’t automatically make a food nutritious. A diet soda may contain very few calories, for example, but that doesn’t give it the nutritional value of water, milk, fruit or other nutrient-containing foods and beverages.

For weight management, low- and no-calorie sweeteners can sometimes be helpful when they replace higher-calorie sources of added sugar. If switching from regular soda to diet soda helps you stay within your calorie prescription, that can be a perfectly reasonable choice.

We still encourage you to build most of your diet around whole and minimally processed foods that provide protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Sweeteners — whether they’re aspartame, sucralose, stevia, monk fruit or something else — don’t need to become a major focus of your diet.

There’s also no need to choose a sweetener simply because the label says “natural.” Natural and artificial describe where or how something originated; they don’t automatically tell us whether one option is safer or healthier than another.

Bottom line: You don’t need to fear artificial sweeteners, and you don’t need to consume them either. If a low- or no-calorie sweetener helps you reduce added sugar or calories and you enjoy it, it can fit into your MacroRx+ plan. Focus more on the quality of your overall diet than on whether an individual food contains a particular sweetener.