Foods and beverages that contain no-calorie artificial sweeteners may be ruining your ability to control your food intake and body weight, according to new research by psychologists at Purdue University’s Ingestive Behavior Research Center.
In their study, when compared with rats that ate yogurt sweetened with glucose (a simple sugar), rats that ate yogurt sweetened with the zero-calorie artificial sweetener saccharin:
- Consumed more calories (and didn’t make up for it by cutting back later)
- Gained more weight
- Put on more body fat
It’s thought that consuming artificial sweeteners breaks the connection between a sweet sensation and a high-calorie food, thereby changing your body’s ability to regulate intake. The researchers also measured the rats’ core body temperatures, which typically rise after eating.
However, after eating a sweet, high-calorie meal, rats that ate saccharin had a lower rise in body temperature than rats that ate glucose.
The researchers believe that this blunted biological response led the rats to overeat, and made it harder to burn off the calories later. They concluded that consuming foods sweetened with saccharin would lead to greater weight gain and body fat than eating the same foods sweetened with sugar.
Although further research needs to be done, the researchers believe that consuming other artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose, and acesulfame K would have similar effects.
The evidence just keeps pouring in that consuming artificial sweeteners will likely wreak havoc on your body by impairing your ability to regulate your appetite naturally.
Just take a look at last week’s article that found drinking diet soda increases your risk of metabolic syndrome and, ultimately, heart disease. Folks, the belief that eating artificially sweetened foods and drinking artificially sweetened beverages will help you to lose weight is a carefully orchestrated deception.
So if you are still opting for diet choices for this reason, you are being sorely misled. In reality, these diet foods and drinks ruin your body’s ability to count calories, thus boosting your inclination to overindulge.
Unfortunately, most public health agencies and nutritionists in the United States recommend these toxic artificial sweeteners as an acceptable alternative to sugar, which is at best confusing and at worst harming the health of those who take their misguided advice.
Consider what the research says:
- Diet sodas may double your risk of obesity
- Artificial sweeteners can stimulate your appetite, increase carbohydrate cravings, and stimulate fat storage and weight gain
Yet, gaining weight is only one of the side effects of consuming these man-made chemical sweeteners.
There is enough evidence showing the dangers of consuming artificial sweeteners to fill an entire book — which is exactly why Dr. Mercola wrote Sweet Deception.
If you or your loved ones drink diet beverages or eat diet foods, this book will explain how you’ve been deceived about the truth behind artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose — for greed, for profits … and at the expense of your own health.
What’s wrong with those tiny pink, blue and yellow packets? Well, take aspartame for instance.
The phenylalanine in aspartame dissociates from the ester bond and increases dopamine levels in your brain.
This can lead to symptoms of depression because it distorts your serotonin/dopamine balance. It can also lead to migraine headaches and brain tumors through a similar mechanism. Furthermore, the aspartic acid in aspartame is a well-documented excitotoxin. Excitotoxins are usually amino acids, such as glutamate and aspartate.
These special amino acids cause particular brain cells to become excessively excited, to the point they will quickly die. Excitotoxins can also cause a loss of brain synapses and connecting fibers.
Then the ester bond in aspartame is broken down to formaldehyde and methanol, which have their own toxicities. So it is not surprising that this popular artificial sweetener has also been found to cause cancer.
So aside from causing you to gain weight, artificial sweeteners may cause all sorts of nasty side effects to your health.
Source: Dr. Mercola http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/2/26/artificial-sweeteners-once-again-linked-to-weight-gain.aspx