Recently, I’ve been doing some posts on food. This is another one.
A friend of mine recently posted a link to a pretty interesting article about an animal model meant to observe the effects of artificial sweeteners on rats. Here’s the money quote:
Even though the saccharin-sweetened yogurt group actually got fewer calories from their yogurt, they gained more weight than the group fed yogurt sweetened with glucose (Swithers & Davidson, 2008; Swithers, Baker, & Davidson, 2009). At the end of 5 weeks of study, the saccharin-fed rats had also gotten significantly fatter than the glucose-fed rats.
With my own body I know that there is some kind of expectation created by texture and flavor when you’re eating a specific food. In my experience, eating artificial sweeteners often makes me hungrier. And after eating a relatively natural diet based on foods that I can recognize, eating something that includes processed ingredients and artificial sweeteners is a shocking experience once I’ve consumed it. I can tell my body doesn’t really know how to react.
If this is something that interests you I also strongly suggest watching the video in my post on sugar by Dr. Robert Lustig as well as the video of Michael Pollan speaking at the Long Now Foundation. These are both long attention span posts, but they are worth your time to understand the world of food we live in.
(I’m aware that there’s some Confirmation Bias in my selection here, but evidence does seem to be aligning with my own personal experience, the experiences of my peers and large groups of people as well – see the videos for more information on the effects of sugar and processed foods.)
I had the exact opposite experience. When I’m on a diet, I *need* to drink sugar free soda (diet coke). Just drinking a lot doesn’t help, I’ll get hungry as hell. Any day without diet coke is the hardest day of my diet.
It makes sense, too; coffein is a known mild appetite suppressant. Also, I lost more than 30 kilos just by switching to diet coke from water.
I love all the HFCS ads that the corn people are putting out. It’s sort of like all the cigarette ads that the tobacco put out in the 80s. History does seem to repeat itself. :)
There’s at least one example out there (xylitol in dogs) where the sweetener triggers insulin release (a dangerous situation, since ingestion can then cause blood sugar to crash). If it varies that significantly between dogs and humans (yes), then I expect that other animal models need to be evaluated for what the insulin response is to the sweetener, and whether that’s equivalent to the human one.
(I suspect the whole thing is going to come down to the subtleties of when insulin is released, since there’s some triggering for that that happens in the mouth, not the stomach.)
I just think, artificial sweeteners just takes so ugly, any time I try coke light/zero, it’s so disgusting. Why not just drink/eat “proper” things but less of it? All those glutamate, saccharin, artificial flavoring etc. is certainly not worth it, try proper food/drinks (when possible) and you’ll enjoy it much more.
Fortunately here in Europe we still have real sugar in most products, not HFCS or other sugar substitutes, although even here more and more products try to substitute sugar for (cheap) artificial sweeteners, so one has to be really careful what to buy.
I’ve been enjoying your food posts quite a bit. I had seen links to the “bitter truth” video before, but yours happened to be the one to get me to watch it. Looking forward to checking out this one, and others :)
P.S. From one of the comments in the article I linked:
“Aspartame is perfectly safe, at least in the dosage we are getting.
Aspartame: a safety evaluation based on current use levels, regulations, and toxicological and epidemiological studies. PMID: 17828671
“The studies provide no evidence to support an association between aspartame and cancer in any tissue. The weight of existing evidence is that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption as a nonnutritive sweetener.”
There was no conflict of interest reported in this review.
The problem might more lie in the fact that product containing aspartame are highly processed.”
PPS. It is best not to use studies on rats as the gold standard when evaluating stuff like this. There are known differences in the way we metabolize food from them.
I am not saying that aspartame is unhealthy, and also the author’s post was rather about gaining weight by them. Even if you don’t gain weight by artificial sweeteners, but also don’t loose by eating them, why not just use natural ingredients like sugar which certainly tastes better?
I guess you’ll enjoy the Jamie Oliver video on TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html
It is a bit lengthy, skip forward to minute 10 for the more interesting part.
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