THANKS, Sarah, for bringing at least one of the problems with fake sugar onto the blog. I also encourage everyone to go to www.mercola.com to see what the health issues are about artificial sweetners. Search the site for anything from aspartame to high fructose corn syrup (yep, that's artifical too) and follow the links. His book "Sweet Deception" pulls all the research together.

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Take this information with a grain of salt; this study was done on rats. If your digestive and endocrine system works like a rat, take it into consideration. If it doesn't, then eat less and exercise more and you can lose the weight...

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does this study's results apply to all non-caloric sweeteners, including stevia and sugar alcohols like xylitol, erythritol, etc.?

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What I don't understand is why there is so much conflicting data on diet and health issues. One report will say something is good for you and another will state the exact opposite. You'll see this with wine, chocolate, fats, sweetners, sugars, etc. It's all how you look at the information. We all know chocolate is not health food but you see these studies advocating it as such. I don't understand why science of all things is trying at times to mislead the general public.

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Bear Silber said...
"What I don't understand is why there is so much conflicting data on diet and health issues."

The answer is elementary, my friend. Simply look for whichever agribusiness/food company sponsored the so-called scientific research, compensated (overtly or covertly) the doctors/researchers, or managed to spin the results to the media reporting it. Be very wary of the apparently high-minded institute, council or research group behind the study. Including the FDA, where the pharmaceutical industry is only a couple of steps ahead of the food industry in buying approval and dissemination of highly suspect "scientific" research.

An excellent place to start is Marion Nestle's 2007 revised and expanded edition of "Food Politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health." Intensely researched and documented,her first edition was provocative and revealing; the second downright damning.

It might at least convert you from an unhealthy sceptic to at least a healthier one, if not a complete cynic.

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I have 20 pounds that begs to differ... Eating sugar is not the way to lose weight.

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I use stevia. I really like it. You might try it. You can find it in whole foods stores.

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It helps to read the actual paper. Here is the link:
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/bne-feb08-swithers.pdf
One should note that the APA journals are extremely reputable in the academic world.

As for the funding comment, it was funded by NIH, the national institute of health which is a government institution - no corporation funded this.

Main Items:
1. rats fed saccharin-sweetened yogurt ate more calories worth of yogurt than rats fed sugar-sweetened yogurt. rats fed saccharin-sweetened yogurt also gained more weight than rats fed sugar-sweetened yogurt.
The researchers say that ones body tends to associate caloric intake with sweetness, and that with the artificial sweetener, this link was disrupted and so the rats could not tell when they were full and ended up actually eating more calories of yogurt than the rats who had sugar sweetened yogurt. They go on to say that eating food products containing artificial sweeteners may disrupts your homeostatic physiological processes.

2.A rat's core body temperature increased if it ate the sugar sweetened yogurt - this is supposedly because the taste receptors on your tongue that sense sweetness are not just so a food tastes better for you, but when sugar hits those receptors, a series of biochemical reactions takes place that tells the body to prep itself to receive sugar by kicking up its metabolism - one way bodies kick up their metabolism is by raising their temp, cause it takes more energy to keep a body warmer. However, this did not happen to the rats who ate the saccharin-sweetened yogurt - the saccharin does not cause the same biochemical reactions, so the rats bodies never got the signal to boost their metabolism - the body eventually learns not to associate the sweetness receptors on the tongue with metabolic activity, and so when the rats went back to eating sugar again, there was also no effect. Thus, the rats who ate the saccharin sweetened yogurt gained more weight, not only because they could not tell how much to eat, but also because their metabolism slowed since it lost the relationship between sweetness and calories.

They only tested saccharin, I'm not sure other non-caloric sweeteners like splenda etc. would do the same or whether there would be differences between natural (stevia) and artificial (splenda) non-caloric sweeteners.

The paper addresses one commentor's issues with comparing rats to people, so do read it.

Weight gain is from over intake of calories compared to calories expended. Sure eating lots of sugar is no good for you - they don't say you should eat all the sugar you want - they just say that artificial sweetener may be worse for you if you substitute it with sugar because you disrupt your body's metabolic signaling processes.

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