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Artificial Sweeteners Associated With Weight Gain, Heart Problems In Analysis of Data From 37 Studies (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The theory behind artificial sweeteners is simple: If you use them instead of sugar, you get the joy of sweet-tasting beverages and foods without the downer of extra calories, potential weight gain and related health issues. In practice, it's not so simple, as a review of the scientific evidence on non-nutritive sweeteners published Monday shows. After looking at two types of scientific research, the authors conclude that there is no solid evidence that sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose help people manage their weight. And observational data suggest that the people who regularly consume these sweeteners are also more likely to develop future health problems, though those studies can't say those problems are caused by the sweeteners.
The review, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, looked at 37 studies. Seven of them were randomized trials, covering about 1,000 people, and the rest were observational studies that tracked the health and habits of almost 406,000 people over time.
The review, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, looked at 37 studies. Seven of them were randomized trials, covering about 1,000 people, and the rest were observational studies that tracked the health and habits of almost 406,000 people over time.
I've struggled a bit with weight for years and recently started a new diet which includes not drinking zero calorie fizzy drinks. Instead I keep chilled filtered water in the fridge and drink that. I've also calorie controlled my diet like I have previously but this time the weight is falling off. The only real difference is the lack of these zero calorie fizzy drinks. Anecdotal yes, but seriously worth considering.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I had diet coke when it was brand new. Never had diet drinks before. It was a test market so no one in other places had heard of it ("you mean 'Tab'?" they'd ask).
The thing is, I don't drink it because it's slimming. I drink it because it tastes better. I can't even bother with real Coke, it just tastes wrong, it's too syrupy, whether or not it's real sugar or high fructose corn syrup. I can't even stand diet Pepsi.
So do you think ordering 2 large Everything pizza's and 4 litres of regular Coke would be better? Would those people get your respect? Or is this just more of the old "lol, fat people, so funny!" trend?
There's many ways that it could have that effect. The part of the puzzle you're missing is poop. Calories in exercise + calories added to fat stores + calories in poop = calories taken in.
The number of calories left in the poop can be dramatically different depending on how the digestive tract is working. Different bacterial flora in the intestines can lead to dramatically different absorption rates of calories from some foods.
Certain foods (I don't know if artificial sweeteners are one, but it wouldn't surprise me) dramatically affect the bacterial flora.
If I'm reading this right, this wasn't merely looking at who has properties X and Y and drawing the correlation, but they also analyzed experimental data where people had artificial sweeteners add to their diet and it didn't have any significant good effects and in some cases resulted in bad outcomes BMI wise, although modest.
But if science is science, then calories in is equal to work done with excess calories becoming weight gained.
This is a simplistic and flawed conclusion. The body is not a closed system that lives in a vacuum with only calories as input/output, it's a lot more complex than that.
Also, calories are not equal. For instance, given a same amount of calories, dietary fat is absorbed a lot more easily by the body than proteins. This doesn't simply mean a difference in energy expenditure, it also means that time is involved.
Here's another example. If you stop eating carbs but you compensate by eating more proteins but not more fatty acids (like omega-3), your body won't go into ketosis, and because your brain can't find neither glucose or ketones to feed itself, it's going to start eating your muscles, not your excess fat. With less muscle your metabolism will progressively slow down. And this can happen no matter how many calories you eat or how many reps you do at the gym.
lucm, indeed.
I should start putting actual sugar in my coffee again
No. You should give up sugar to the extent possible and just not expect
artificial sweeteners to help much with that goal, and don't expect them
to be entirely harmless.
(I'd not worry about the added sugar in stuff like ketchup, unless you find
yourself eating large quantities of it, but do keep an eye on food labels
and eliminate anything that has way more sugar than you'd expect.)
An occasional life saver, sucked not chewed, should be able to take the
edge off at first when you hit a severe jag... note that one 12oz can of
sugared coke is 3 of those, despite not even being very sweet compared
to the sucralose diet coke, and not much sweeter than the aspartame
diet coke.
I've quit daily sugar intake twice now; it is not easy for some people to do.
I had been off sugar for about a decade, started indulging again, and
gained 10lbs in a year. Am now still considered overweight by 5lbs despite
being mostly back off the sugar, but weight has more or less stabilized.
Cholesterol went down after getting back off, as well.
During that whole decade before the weight gain I was drinking more sucralose
and aspartame than anyone would think healthy. Still am. There is no "artificial"
taste for me anymore... sugar actually tastes weak and underwhelming. The
artificial sweeteners probably do screw up the gut a bit... but sugar is worse overall.
Drink something that tastes better than coffee. or better coffee; you won't need
to sweeten it so much.
Someone had to do it.
The other have should be the connection to caffeine. As already stated below, sugary tastes make you hungrier. While the caffeine turns off the chemicals associated with hunger. This is why it's so prevalent in diet pills. But what happens when you put both together? You get a concoction which puts your body into a constant chemical imbalance. Has their been a long term study stating what happens when this happens? Or has Coke/Pepsi already buried the report?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
The parent shouldn't be marked as a troll. Studies have shown that your body reacts to these sweeteners as if they were sugar. Meaning your body will release insulin in anticipation of the food spiking your blood sugar. However that spike never happens so excess insulin ends up causing low blood sugar levels and that signals you to eat more. So yes, using artificial sweeteners will cause you to eat more calories even though they don't have any.
To lower the target weight, the key is not to exercise more or eat less, it's to gradually increase sensitivity to leptin, by having a carefully tuned rotation of high fat and carbs aspects to the diet.
My personal experience is that that is BS. In January I decided I should do something with my weight. I had a BMI of 34.1 then. As of today I have a BMI of 25.6, a net loss of 29kg.
I didn't do any "careful balance" of anything except making sure my daily energy intake was ~500kcal below my target. I still eat pizzas and hamburgers whenever I feel like (which is quite often). I'm still losing weight, as I'm still consuming less energy than I expend on a daily basis.
My key for losing weight was to figure out ways to hit my reduced kcal target without feeling like I was on a diet, so that I wouldn't have to resist urges for a snack or an extra meal.
I think there may be other factors.
I'm not dieting.
I exercise modestly (a mile or two a day walking and 30 pushups and giving a couple hours of therapeutic body work a week).
My weight and blood pressure have dropped since I retired (at 51).
Blood pressure from 160ish to 112 last visit. Weight from 278 to 245.
I have 2-6 artificial sweeteners a day in my coffee/soda and I also cook with it.
My blood sugar has declined from 144 when I retired to 112 last doctors' visit a couple months ago.
I occasionally still go to buffets.
Perhaps stress contributes. Work was killing me and I'm not the only person I know like that. One friend dropped 5 of 6 blood pressure medicines in the 6 months after he retired.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
What I see is people jumping to conclusions that it's the artificial sweeteners that cause the problem, disregarding the simpler explanation of who the main consumers of artificial sweeteners are: People who overindulge, not taste seekers. When their problem of craving carbohydrates doesn't go away; they end up eating more to satisfy their craving. The fries and a Coke becomes two large fries and a Diet Coke.
So I think the parent isn't just a troll but an insightful troll.
One problem with the energy balance argument is the balance part. 10 kcal per day surplus over 10 years is 36,500 kcal -- does that result in someone morbidly obese? Would the same amount as a deficit result in famine-like thinness?
If it did, then maintaining any body weight would be extremely difficult and diets would either be extremely trivial (a 100 kcal deficit over 2 years should result in extreme weight loss) *and* extremely difficult, since we would need extremely accurate measures of energy consumption to regulate energy intake correctly.
The more likely explanation is that the body has a regulation mechanism where both deficits and surpluses are regulated in a way that requires either sustained, major energy consumption, major energy intake reductions, or both, to affect weight. And experience suggests that the regulation system works so well that even doing this seldom results in significant weight reduction (or results in side effects of lack of vigor that it is abandoned).
your body will release insulin in anticipation of the food spiking your blood sugar.
That would take exactly one twenty-minute experiment to prove true/false.
Where's the citations? Anyone....?
Sort of. I participated in a class once that did something along these lines as a demonstration of insulin reaction (indirectly, using blood sugar as a metric) to selected foods. Several guinea pig class members, I was one, used a glucometer and recorded serum glucose levels then we ate a bit of three different foods. One guy ate 1/2 a Snickers candy bar, one of ate a plain rice cake and I ate some ham. We waited a bit, took another blood sugar sample. Waited a bit more and took a final blood sugar test. Then we reported on how we felt
The ham guy, me, had almost no change. The Snickers guy saw his blood sugar rise then drop below baseline, got some energy then crashed a little. The greatest reaction, by far, was the plain rice cake. That person had the greatest rise in blood sugar followed by a greater drop and actually got a little shaky.
The point of the experiment was to show some misconceptions. Everyone thought the rice cake was healthy and the candy bar and fatty ham was unhealthy.
Wrong, at least from an insulin flooding standpoint. The rice cake is pure sugar. Starch is just glucose chained together. It turns out that the candy bar, poor nutritionally as it was, had a milder effect because of the fat it contains. Fat seems to blunt the insulin response. Doesn't make the sugar any less, but moderates the insulin reaction. The rice cake hadn't that moderator so it produced the most dramatic reaction.
That's why restaurants like to start you off with bread while you're perusing the menu. It ain't just being hospitable. They want your blood sugar to be plummeting when you order.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Real life example. Posting anonymously so there's no way for anyone to validate when I'm saying of course, but this is a topic near and dear to my heart so hopefully most folks will take me at my word.
I'm a 41 year old male of Pakistani background, but born and raised in England. During my early years, I spent a lot of time playing soccer, cricket, and going to the gym for an hour or two every day. Once I started working (around 23-ish), I stopped having time for the gym and slowly my cricket and soccer time evaporated too. Started off at 140lbs and within a few years, went up to around 180lbs. My diet wasn't very varied. Breakfast was normally cereal and 2% milk. Lunch was whatever I could grab from the workplace vending machine and dinner was a couple of chupattis with chicke, beef, or lamb. 2 glasses of 2% milk a day (on to of my cereal milk). I really loved drinking cold milk. My water intake was very low - I drank either milk or coke/pepsi. Don't really go to the doctors unless I'm really sick with something.
Fast forward to my 40's. I'm married and have two young girls. Weight around 220lbs. Can barely run around with my kids for more than 2 mins before getting winded. My life is fairly sedentary. Wake up at 6am, go to work for around 7am. Leave work at 6pm ,get home, spend some time with the family and in bed for 10am. Rinse and repeat.
I know I'm overweight and out of shape but not really motivated to do anything about it. Love my junk food too much (custard and apple crumble pie, fish and chips, potato chips etc.).
Life insurance renewal time comes around mid-2016 and they do a battery of tests. Turns out I'm Class I or Class II obese (can't remember which one). The nurse who came to my home to do the tests says, "You're young, have a nice family, but you need to take better care of yourself. This isn't good or healthy". No-one, not my doctor, colleagues, family, or friends had said anything up to this point. I KNEW I was out of shape but since no-one told me, I was self-deluded.
Made a decision that night to drop my weight to 180lb. That was the weight I needed to be to get a discount off my life insurance. Not the best motivation reason I know :) Started doing some research and was convinced by the Atkins diet. From a science perspective, it just made sense to me. Cut out sugars and carbs. Fewer carbs = less fat.
I also signed up at a gym, and bought myself a fitbit and downloaded the Myfitnesspal app to my phone so I could track my nutrition. I wanted to know my calories in, but also wanted to make sure I was getting my required vitamins etc.
I won't lie, the first few weeks were REALLY hard. I wasn't miserable or anything, but I definitely had cravings for sugar/bread. I lived off a diet of chicken, steak, fish, Vega All-In-One shakes, water, and very few green veggies. Absolutely no fruits or nuts. Cut out milk entirely. Forced myself to go to the gym everyday and would burn a minimum of 600 calories before I would leave. I measured my calorie burn through my fitbit watch. Realized that doing cardio was a great calorie burner but lifting weights wasn't getting me the numbers I wanted. I know this isn't good(tm) but initially, my motivation was driven by numbers.
Cardio meant the stair climber, treadmill, or elliptical. The first week, I could only do bouts of 5 mins with 3 min breaks on the stair climber before I felt very exhausted. Maybe 2 mins running on the treadmill before my shin splits were too painful to tolerate. Made a decision that each week, I would increase my workout by 2 mins but keep my 'rest' period at 3 mins.
Started dropping some significant weight in the first month. Went from 220lbs to 212lbs. I would weigh myself daily each morning, same time. If I lost more than 1lb in a day, I'd increase my food intake by half a cup or so but I wouldn't compromise my training time. If I lost less than 0.2lbs, I'd decrease my food portion by the same 1/2 cup.