Are artificial sweeteners making you FAT?
Recent literature in the Journal of Behavior
Neuroscience examined the role that sweet taste has on predicting the
caloric content of food. Researchers suggested that "animals may use sweet
taste to predict the caloric contents of food. Eating sweet, non-caloric
substances may degrade this predictive relationship, leading to positive
energy balance through increased food intake and / or diminished energy
expenditure". SO WHAT DID THE RESEARCHERS
FIND?
The results of this study demonstrated that rats who where given non-caloric
sweeteners exhibited greater caloric intake, greater body weight gain,
increased adiposity, impaired ability to compensate for the calories
contained in novel sweet food by eating less during subsequent test meal,
and a smaller increment in core body temperature following consumption of a
novel, sweetened high calorie food.
Researchers suggested that this may help to explain the growing trend in
obesity. The increased consumption of non-caloric / calorie free sweetened
beverages, snacks, and foods may be messing up our ability to predict our
caloric intake and may help to explain the growing obesity trends we see in
humans today?
Take home message from the study: If
you're a rat, don't consume artificial sweeteners!
All kidding aside, more human trials would be needed to confirm these
findings. However, the results seem to be consistent with some previous
research done on animals. It would be interesting to have a study that
compared artificial versus natural sweeteners to see if there would be any
difference in the results if a plant based natural non-caloric sweetener
such as stevia was used. My first inclination would be that it may have the
same physiological effects as did the artificial sweetener had in this
study. So you may also want to be careful with natural low / non-caloric
sweeteners such stevia, xylitol, etc.
If you're having trouble dropping the lbs and you tend to consume a lot of
artificial or natural sweeteners (soda, gums, bars, powders, tea, coffee,
etc.), you may what to consider eliminating them from your diet all
together.
Swithers, S., Davidson T. A role for sweet taste: Calorie Predictive
Relations in Energy Regulation in Rats. Behavioral Neuroscience. 2008 (22)
1: 161-173.
Full text link:
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/bne-feb08-swithers.pdf
In good health,
Dr. Rene Asselin (DC, BPHE, CSCS, D.Ac., ART, RTP, CPTI)
