They are the non-sugar sweeteners we are told will cut calories and help us lose weight but new research shows they could actually be making you eat more. These substances act by enhancing the flavor and sweetness of beverage and foods without increasing blood sugar. “We are more likely to use a combination of food and drink characteristics, including taste, flavour and texture, to predict energy content, rather than simply sweetness”. In the United States six synthetic sweeteners are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA): sucralose, saccharin, aspartame, advantame, acesulfame potassium (Ace-K), and neotame.
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The study, co-led by the University of Sydney, discovered that there is an area of the brain that senses and integrates the sweetness and energy content of food.
Artificially sweetened foods, the researchers suggest, generate a kind of starvation effect-the brain perceives a calorie shortage and seeks to close it. Sucralose is derived from sucrose and is up to 650 times sweeter than sugar.
The researchers used fruit flies in the study.
Researchers at the University of Sydney fed fruit flies and mice a diet including sucralose, and found it throws off the brain’s reward centers, as they consumed far more calories than they needed.
We’ve known for a while now that low-fat and sugar-free alternatives aren’t exactly the catch-all solution that they were promised to be, but this new research adds credence to the notion that we should stick to full-fat versions of the foods we choose – albeit in sensible portions – in order to avoid the unnecessarily and potentially risky calories added by artificial sweeteners.
“When sweetness versus energy is out of balance for a period of time, the brain re-calibrates and increases total calories consumed”, said lead researcher Associate Professor Greg Neely from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Science.
“The chronic consumption of the artificial sweetener actually increases the sweet intensity of real nutritive sugar which then increases the animal’s overall motivation to eat more food”, Neely stated in the work published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
“The pathway we discovered is part of a conserved starvation response that actually makes nutritious food taste better when you are starving”, he said.
Similarly, when exposed to a high sucralose-sweetened diet for 7 days, the mice increased food consumption, and the same neuronal pathway was activated.
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“The idea that foods and drinks containing low calorie sweeteners might increase appetite and promote obesity is not supported by the vast majority of studies, including randomised controlled trials in humans”.
