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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.
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.
I have not had any weight problems until recently. I did two things to reduce my calories. First, I cut out my end of day beer. It took me a while to figure out why people enjoyed a beer at the end of the day but for some reason I started the habit. It's relaxing and dulls the aches from the day but it also has a lot of calories. I lost 20 pounds fairly quickly after dropping that habit. Second, I started to keep bottled water around the house. When thirsty I tended to grab whatever I had in a single serve bottle or can. This usually meant a fizzy drink. With bottled water on hand I can grab one of those instead.
Bottled water comes in handy when there are things contaminate the city water like floods or some idiot put a backhoe through a water main. This does not happen often but when it does and city water is deemed undrinkable then bottled water can get real hard to find. I keep a few bottles in the freezer for when I need to put ice in a cooler, when the ice melts I drink the water from the bottle. Also good for adding thermal mass to the refrigerator and freezer for when the power blinks.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"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.
Insulin releases is triggered by the pancreas (and more specifically the islets of Langerhans) when heightened glucose level in blood is being detected. It has nothing to do with sweetness on the tongue...
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I'd suggest you take back Human Biology 101 instead of posting on
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.
old myth still perpetuated by poorly informed fitness experts and dietitians. insulin release is purely a chemical reaction to blood sugar levels not to what you taste or think.
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.
...you can drop 2 slices of cucumber into a pitcher of water and it gives the whole thing a nice refreshing flavor.
They do that a lot in restaurants here (Stockholm). It actually tastes just fine. Of course, so does a slice or two of lemon, lime, or orange.
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