Posted on 02/10/2008 9:22:11 PM PST by neverdem
USING an artificial, no-calorie sweetener rather than sugar may make it tougher, not easier, to lose weight, US researchers said today.
Scientists at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, studied rats that were fed food with the artificial sweetener saccharin and rats fed food with glucose, a natural sugar.
In comparison to rats given yogurt sweetened with glucose, those that ate yogurt sweetened with saccharin went on to consume more calories and put on more weight and body fat.
The researchers said sweet foods may prompt the body to get ready to take in a lot of calories, but when sweetness in the form of artificial sweeteners is not followed by a large amount of calories, the body gets confused, which may lead to eating more or expending less energy than normal.
"The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharin can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with high-calorie sugar,'' Purdue researchers Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson wrote in the journal, Behavioural Neuroscience, published by the American Psychological Association.
"Such an outcome may seem counterintuitive, if not an anathema, to human clinical researchers and health care practitioners who have long recommended the use of low- and no-calorie sweeteners as a means of weight control.''
Other artificial sweeteners such as aspartame that also taste sweet but do not lead to the delivery of calories may have similar effects, the researchers said.
"Animals may use sweet taste to predict the caloric contents of food. Eating sweet noncaloric substances may degrade this predictive relationship,'' the researchers wrote.
"With the growing use of noncaloric sweeteners in the current food environment, millions of people are being exposed to sweet tastes that are not associated with caloric or nutritive consequences,'' the researchers added.
The...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
OK, so it is time for ethical human experiments with informed consent.
Right away, I saw the flaw in this experiment: saccharine tastes like crap! I don’t know how they even get away with calling it a “sweetener.”
The “dangers” of aspartame are a hoax. But it does taste bad to some people. If you are one of them, use Splenda.
Splenda is great stuff.
Sugar is basically poison.
If you don’t carry a diet soda around all day—sip, sip, sip, nonstop—you won’t have a problem. Drink or eat something that artificially sweetened—along with some real food—and you won’t have a problem with insulin resistance.
These experiments with rats and couch potatoes are ludicrous. All such an experiment can possibly show is how a rat or a couch potato might be able to lose a little weight. And at the end of the experiment, the rat is still a rat and the couch potato is still a couch potato.
Independent researchers say Splenda chemically resembles pesticides. The bonds between its carbon and chlorine atoms are more like a chlorocarbon than a salt — and most pesticides are chlorocarbons. The manufacturer’s own studies showed that Splenda caused shrunken thymus glands and enlarged livers and kidneys in rodents. Despite this, the FDA approved it due to the manufacturers’ “stature” in the industry.
Source: http://www.womentowomen.com/nutritionandweightloss/splenda.aspx
For an all-natural, calorie free sugar substitute that actually has nutritional benefits (better insulin regulation, etc.), try Stevia, particularly Stevia extract. If you have a Trader Joe’s in your area, their product is excellent, and cost effective.
Dump the diet drinks.
My doc (new doc) insisted.
But I like my sweet drinks so my bottled water guy gave me x20 flavored powder to add to my water.
It is stevia leave extract and cofeeberry both also work in the liver on insulin issues.
All Natural. In 3 diff. flavors.
Spendy though.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Who uses saccharin any more? It’s NutraSweet for me.
Geeze! What a **dumb** study!
What’s this stuff called? Stevia leaf flavored powder? Or what’s the brand name?
As someone who’s gained and lost weight at various times, I’d put zero credibility in this study. Not that their findings may not be true for rats, but lets face it, rats will piss on their own food.
90% of weight loss is caloric intake.. reduce your intake, you’ll lose weight... being more active helps, and yes, you have to deal with plateaus and modifications to what you are doing to get past them, but no way someone consciously watching their calorie intake and using artificial sweetners to help with it, is overcompensating with calories elsewhere.
A doctor worried about your nutrition is not going to just say cut out diet sodas... he’s going to tell you cut out all sodas, and all teas, kool aid, etc..... these products leech all sorts of healthy things out of your body.
Plain water is the preferred drink any health care provider is going to recommend that’s worth a damn.
The sweetner is also “tied” to MS and brain cancer..
Freepmail me if you want on or off of the diabetes ping list.
Do you have links to reputable sources?
I can’t stand Splenda (or any of the other artificial sweeteners). Taste awful and cause digestive upsets.
The food from the gods for me is Whey Low ( http://www.wheylow.com ). It’s a 1-to-1 sugar replacement with the same carb count (1 per teaspoon) as Splenda and 1/4 the calories of sugar; it acts like, bakes like, cooks up like sugar.
When I was using it, I lost weight without otherwise dieting. I even made my own soft drink syrups with it. Unfortunately, Dew addict that I am, I started drinking Dew again over the holidays and haven’t yet replaced it with my Whey Low drinks.
I love the coffee drinks I make with it:
http://www.cookingwithpam.com/sugarfree/low_carb_coffee_drinks.html
Which really makes it stupid that I’m still drinking Dew, other than it’s just easier to flip open a can than to mix up my own stuff. ;)
I believe that it was recommended in the Atkins diet that you limit the amount of artificial sweetners because they can fool the brain into thinking that they are sugars, but I think that Splenda was different. I don’t remember why. Atkins also said that the other sweetners like equal are particularly bad for migraine headache sufferers.
Raw sugar in moderation won’t kill you (unless you’re diabetic.)
I’ll stick with nature’s sugar.
Splenda, on the other hand, is a gift from the gods
ummm, well, not quite...
Splenda is created from sucralose - a synthetic compound - by altering it with chlorine molecules. Not sure if that’s a good thing. The only reason it “passes through” is because most of our digestive systems are clogged up with mucus and gunk.
Splenda’s own research on lab rats also showed it caused shrunken thymus glands, enlarged livers and enlarged kidneys. Not sure if that’s a good thing, either.
Not anymore.. but I've know several people that had brain cancer and were addicts(almost) of diet soda.. And read about people after stopping diet soda then the MS went away or got much better..
Bottom line a couple of artificial sweetners should be flagged as suspious.. There could be other problems caused by them I'm not aware of.. Especially with overuse.. Some people may be much more senstive to the harmful effects of them.. There are SOME people that drink nothing BUT diet this or that..
Why do you say that? Because you want to believe it? I see no “hoax” in the fact that GD Searle politically manipulated FDA approval for it to be used in carbonated beverages.
Once aspartame is heated to over 85 degrees, it breaks down into formaldehyde and woodgrain alcohol. Searle tried to cover this up in addition to the adverse side effects (tumors, MS-like symptoms, neurological seizures) experienced by test animals.
“Before you decide to “stick with aspartame”, I think you should “google” it first. Then decide. It is nasty stuff.”
And then take a big ol’ grain of salt, since so much of the stuff about aspartame is pure tinfoil-hat. You can usually recognize such sites by their extremely amateurish and scattershot approach.
Please be aware that aspartame causes stomach and other problems for some people. I try hard to avoid it, but they put that crap in almost everything.
X20 Blast Flavored packets
Freep mail me if you want the website or phone number.
It is by mail only.
I buy a personal supply but the website comes across for those who want to be venders for it.
I just wanted the packets so I called the company and they set me up on a 25 a month packet auto ship. Which makes shipping free.
cost $30 a month but you can use 1/2 a packet at a time per directions or the whole packet depending on your taste.
King Vanity is starting to develope high BG off and on so I am also using it for him along with the X20 sachets which adds hydration to water.
The web site explains that.
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