My Secret to Sustained Weight Loss.

craigo3154 wrote: »

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/

Gain weight by “going diet?” Artificial sweeteners and the neurobiology of sugar cravings --Neuroscience 2010

It's not the calories, or whether artificial sweeteners are harmful chemicals (which they are not in the volumes of regular consumption), but the brain's desire for sweet.

From personal experience, eat less sweet things for an extended period and you no longer desire sweet things. Your taste (and brain) becomes more sensitised to sweet and requires less sweet things to satisfy it.

But do artificial sweeteners actually help reduce weight?

Surprisingly, epidemiologic data suggest the contrary. Several large scale prospective cohort studies found positive correlation between artificial sweetener use and weight gain. The San Antonio Heart Study examined 3,682 adults over a seven- to eight-year period in the 1980s [18]. When matched for initial body mass index (BMI), gender, ethnicity, and diet, drinkers of artificially sweetened beverages consistently had higher BMIs at the follow-up, with dose dependence on the amount of consumption. Average BMI gain was +1.01 kg/m2 for control and 1.78 kg/m2 for people in the third quartile for artificially sweetened beverage consumption. The American Cancer Society study conducted in early 1980s included 78,694 women who were highly homogenous with regard to age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and lack of preexisting conditions [19]. At one-year follow-up, 2.7 percent to 7.1 percent more regular artificial sweetener users gained weight compared to non-users matched by initial weight. The difference in the amount gained between the two groups was less than two pounds, albeit statistically significant. Saccharin use was also associated with eight-year weight gain in 31,940 women from the Nurses’ Health Study conducted in the 1970s [20].

Preload experiments generally have found that sweet taste, whether delivered by sugar or artificial sweeteners, enhanced human appetite. Aspartame-sweetened water, but not aspartame capsule, increased subjective appetite rating in normal weight adult males [33]. Aspartame also increased subjective hunger ratings compared to glucose or water [34]. Glucose preload reduced the perceived pleasantness of sucrose, but aspartame did not [34]. In another study, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, and saccharin were all associated with heightened motivation to eat and more items selected on a food preference list [35]. Aspartame had the most pronounced effect, possibly because it does not have a bitter aftertaste. Unlike glucose or sucrose, which decreased the energy intake at the test meal, artificial sweetener preloads either had no effect [33,35] or increased subsequent energy intake [36,37]. Those findings suggest that the calorie contained in natural sweeteners may trigger a response to keep the overall energy consumption constant.

Human research must rely on subjective ratings and voluntary dietary control. Rodent models helped elucidate how artificial sweeteners contribute to energy balance. Rats conditioned with saccharin supplement had significantly elevated total energy intake and gained more weight with increased body adiposity compared to controls conditioned with glucose [38]. Saccharin-conditioned rats also failed to curb their chow intake following a sweet pre-meal. When a flavor was arbitrarily associated with high or low caloric content, rats ate more chow following a pre-meal with the flavor predictive of low caloric content [39]. These studies pose a hypothesis: Inconsistent coupling between sweet taste and caloric content can lead to compensatory overeating and positive energy balance.

clicketykeys wrote: »

Emphasis added; what this suggests to me is that artificial sweeteners make intuitive eating / intuitive calorie maintenance more difficult, and more likely to result in maintenance or gain rather than loss. However, weighing solids and measuring liquids, and recording & logging those calories (as often suggested on the boards here) would offset that.

clicketykeys wrote: »

I did not see a study that had adults eat similar meals, one with a diet soda, one with water, one with regular soda, and then have them rate their satisfaction afterward and their perceived hunger an hour later, two hours later, and five hours later. That's something I'd love to find!

ginalove1960 wrote: »

It's been all over the news and the internet.

cwolfman13 wrote: »

ginalove1960 wrote: »

Well, that's just what I had been reading. That people who drank diet soda tended to be just as fat as people who drank regular soda, according to studies.
All I know is that when I quit drinking diet soda, the weight started dropping off of me like a waterfall. And that's no exaggeration.

While this is true from what I've read, it's not simply because they're drinking diet soda that is making them just as fat...it's because the rest of their diet isn't in order and they're still over consuming calories in general.

I mentioned it before, but in my general observations, a lot of people who drink diet soda think they're being good...but they overindulge elsewhere. Like they get the double bacon cheeseburger and large fry, but it's all good because they're washing it down with a diet coke...never mind that they're still eating a substantial amount of calories.