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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.
eat four times as much.
I delivered pizza in college. 2 large Everything pizza's and 4 litres of Diet Coke. Who orders that? Yep, every time. Like the Diet Coke is going to offset 4 slices of Everything pizza.
I see it our community pool every summer. Some of these kids I don't see for 8 months. They come down each summer a little larger. Kids drink Diet Coke and then eat 4 hotdogs or 2 burgers. I see it every weekend. People eat multiple burgers/hotdogs, chips and fatty dip, strawberries with pound cake and whip cream, all while sipping their slimming Diet Coke.
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!"
Can anyone say confounding by indication? In the same way that people who get a lot of EKGs are at much higher risk of having a heart attack, people who consume artificial sweetners are at increased risk of obesity.
No one would suggest that getting an EKG increases your risk of heart attacks but people who get a lot of them are certainly at a much, MUCH higher risk of heart attacks. That is because if you have risk factors and complain of chest pain and shortness of breath to a doctor, she will send you for an EKG. In the same way, people self select to consume artificial sweetners if they are fat.
My understanding is that eating something sweet causes an insulin rush (actually, merely the taste of sweetness on the tongue triggers this, you don't even have to swallow it.) If the insulin arrives, and finds no real sugars in the bloodstream, this is like crying wolf. Eventually the insulin stops responding to the sweetness trigger, which is 'insulin resistance.' This causes real sugar to linger in the bloodstream longer before it's processed, although I forgot how that leads to obesity; probably a secondary metabolic pathway converts the 'leftovers' to fat.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This is even trickier than it looks. The artificial sweeteners are so realistic that they fool the body into thinking that you just drank tons of sugar, so insuline level is adjusted, but since there's no actual sugar it makes you crave sweets.
So yes you probably should use actual sugar, if possible natural sugar (brown) not white processed poison, but if you can progressively dial it down to a point where you don't put sugar at all your body will thank you.
Let's be clear: the body has no need for sugar, it has no nutritional value whatsoever.
lucm, indeed.
"brown sugar" isn't natural sugar. It is refined sugar with molasses added back in. The molasses is what they removed in previous steps, slightly burnt.
Natural sugar, which you can buy in most stores now, will be labeled "raw sugar" or "washed sugar" and it will be large crystals of a honey blond color.
The advantage of brown sugar is only that the flavor is so strong, you can modify recipes to use less. At a 1:1 ratio with no reduction, the brown sugar is more processed and more unhealthy than regular refined sugar.
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.
The key phrase in the above summary is:
"those studies can't say those problems are caused by the sweeteners"
meaning the studies are pretty useless, and the /. headline:
"Artificial Sweeteners Associated With Weight Gain, Heart Problems In Analysis of Data From 37 Studies"
is completely misleading.
Undoubtedly as many other posters have suggested the problem is behavioral, which will surprise no one and doesn't require 37 studies to demonstrate.
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.
It could be a lifestyle problem. I know that in my case I started with sugar cola, then switched to diet because I was getting too much sugar, so much I was starting to show off early signs of diabetes mellitus. Then now I am trying to switch off to water (more difficult than you think - I have now bouts of water consumption and bouts of soda without sugar - bad habits are hard to shake. On the other hand my weight is dropping).
For many people the alternative is not healthy lifestyle with diet soda and healthy lifestyle without, the alternative is unhealthy lifestyle with lotta sugar and sugary drink OR unhealthy lifestyle with diet cola , that is slightly less sugar. As such , yes people consuming artificial sweetener soda seem to are more likely to get lifestyle related disease... But the alternative may actually be they get those disease earlier if they consumed sugary drink instead.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
"Endorphins? You mean like Flipper?" - Suzanne "Sugar"baker on Designing Women
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
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.
"brown sugar" isn't natural sugar. It is refined sugar with molasses added back in.
Not necessarily. See Wikipedia:
Brown sugar is a sucrose sugar product with a distinctive brown color due to the presence of molasses. It is either an unrefined or partially refined soft sugar consisting of sugar crystals with some residual molasses content (natural brown sugar), or it is produced by the addition of molasses to refined white sugar (commercial brown sugar).
lucm, indeed.
Correction, 1 12 oz coke is 8ish lifesavers. Not 3, Don't know why I typed 3.
Someone had to do it.
Or better, skip sugar.
Milk, no sugar for me.
The problem is that we have too much of easily available carbohydrates in our food today causing the blood sugar levels to do bungyjumping all over the place resulting in us being tired, hungry and develop diabetes.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Full fake coke would be better. Fat makes you feel more full, takes longer to digest, and takes more energy to digest. Fat doesn't make you fat. Stop avoiding fat.
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.
Emphasis mine, on the part you left out.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And any fat you exercise away goes out in sweat or urine.
Much of it goes out your breath, actually. Both water and carbon dioxide are byproducts of the oxidations.
[T]he sweeteners appear to change the population of intestinal bacteria that direct metabolism, the conversion of food to energy or stored fuel. And this result suggests the connection might also exist in humans.
https://www.scientificamerican...
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Hey feel free to subscribe to common misconceptions instead of educating yourself. This whole subject area has been plagued by such shallow beliefs and unproven "truths" that resistance from the lemmings is to be expected when they're presented with new information.
lucm, indeed.
Did you know that the level of insulin during fasting is higher for obese people? This has been demonstrated time and again, and if you know someone with type-2 diabetes that needs insulin shots, they will confirm to you that it's really difficult to lose weight when you're swimming in insulin, and it's not a matter of being hungry, the body simply won't shed weight.
They did an experiment in the 90s, giving gradually larger doses of insulin to subjects for a period of 6 months while cutting their calorie intake, and yet on average they gained 20 pounds.
There is no pill to fix that. There's some evidence that a diet of mostly high fat and plants with intermittend fasting and intermittent carb days is the best approach. So far it's the best hope because the level of physical activty in the USA has significantly increased at the same time as the level of obesity skyrocketed, so "eat less move more" just doesn't work.
But again, only time will tell.
lucm, indeed.