Weight guides
Stories
Videos
Get startedHow artificial sweeteners could make us eat more
According to a new study artificial sweeteners could increase hunger by making the brain believe we are starving:
Scientific American: How Artificial Sweeteners May Cause Us to Eat More
A vast body of research suggests that sugar substitutes, despite having far fewer calories than sugar itself, can wreak various forms of metabolic havoc such as upping diabetes risk and — perhaps paradoxically — causing weight gain in the long term.
The actual studies referred to were done using flies and mice, so the relevance for humans is not certain. But it matches several studies on humans showing for example that women lose weight by giving up drinking diet sodas.
Does this make you motivated to throw out the diet soda (if you haven’t already)?
Earlier about artificial sweeteners
How to Lose Weight #9: Avoid Artificial Sweeteners
Study: Avoiding Diet Beverages Helps Women Lose Weight
Another Reason to be Sceptical of Artificial Sweeteners
Artificial sweeteners are lab synthetics. This study only looked at one of them (sucralose), and has the additional limitations of fruit flies and mice as subjects. Let's presume for the sake of discussion that the effect they discovered is true for any sweetener not metabolized to glucose (and I won't be surprised if this is broadly correct).
The issue then becomes dietary context. On a typical full-time glycemic diet, the brain may well be figuring out that it's been fed a lie. But what happens on an LCHF diet where the consumer is at least partially fat-adapted, and the food is actually nutrient-rich (from fat and perhaps protein). Brain gets the ketone bodies, and a slow rate of glucose, to keep it happy, and may not feel lied to.
My family has been using stevia, xylitol, erythritol, inulin and more rarely monk fruit as sweeteners, and has not experienced any appetite provocation; quite the opposite really. But then we're on a borderline keto diet, and the sweeteners we use aren't sucralose, and what they are may metabolize to SCFAs. Food for thought. says the brain.
Lots in indirect stuff, and assumptions being drawn, but a simple test would be insulin response to sucrose/fructose sweetened water versus artificially sweetened water.
It appears so, in which case the question becomes how significant is it in terms of level, duration and now, endocrine signalling.
For the alternative, nominally natural sweeteners, you need to search on each one by name, such as "stevia insulin response".
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2900484/#!po=36.1538
Better to drink water, coffee and other non-sweetened drinks.
What raises the insulin in stevia and aspartame then?
Thx for the link :)
They did claim, however: "When consuming stevia and aspartame preloads, participants did not compensate by eating more at either their lunch or dinner meal and reported similar levels of satiety compared to when they consumed the higher calorie sucrose preload."
http://www.lowcaloriessweeteners.com/artificial-sweeteners-and-their-...