Hello and welcome back my friend;

Can you really gain weight from diet foods?

That just seems wrong.

When the low fat revolution began, along with it came the use of artificial sweeteners. So then everyone was told to eat low fat foods, and drink diet drinks. That’s what I was taught in medical school. That was all the information I had to offer my patients. I have learned differently, and I want to share with you some very interesting information regarding artificial sweeteners.

To start with, we need to understand why we eat.

What drives the desire to eat?

Eating food gives us satisfaction and shares in the same brain circuitry with other pleasurable activities such as sex and drug administration. We call this food reward.

Food reward has two roads. One to the brain, and the other away, from the brain.

The first road to the brain, is called the sensory road. When we eat there are signals that go to our brain to tell us we just ate something. Then there is another road that leaves the brain to tell our gut that we have received enough food and we are full. This is call called the postingestive road.

When rats are deprived of food, then given a choice between glucose (which has 15 calories per teaspoon, in it) versus saccharin (which has no calories) , they preferred the glucose. It appears that that the artificial sweetener does not send a message along the postingestive pathway to the gut telling it “you are full.”

In another study at Purdue University’s Ingestive Behavior Research Center, reported that relative to rats that ate yogurt sweetened with glucose (which has calories), rats given yogurt sweetened with no calorie saccharin later;

• consumed more calories
• gained more weight
• put on more body fat
• and didn’t make up for it by cutting back on consumption.

Put more succinctly in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, “lack of completed satisfaction, likely because of the failure to activate the postingestive component, further fuels the food seeking.” So those that use artificial sweeteners are never full and keep eating.

I realize that this is all done on rats and not on humans, but the findings match emerging evidence that people who drink more diet drinks are at higher risk for obesity. They are also at risk for developing metabolic syndrome, which is a collection of medical problems such as abdominal fat, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance that put people at risk for heart disease and diabetes.

So if you are thinking that diet soft drinks are the answer to weight loss.  I strongly encourage you to think again.

Evidence is mounting that they lead to weight gain rather then weight loss.  Those who consume diet drinks regularly have a 200 percent increased risk of weight gain and a 67 percent increase risk of diabetes. A study of over 400 people found that those who drank two diet sodas per day had five times the increase in waist circumference as those who did not drink soda.

What are the different names of artificial sweeteners?

• Nutrasweet
• Splenda
• Acesulfame potassium Ace K
• Aspartame
• Cyclamate
• Isomalt
• Saccharin
• Sucralose
• Alitame
• Neohesperidine dihydrochalcone
• Aspartame-acesulfame salt
• Sorbitol
• Maltitol

If you need something sweet, then I recommend Stevia.  Stevia comes from the sunflower family, is low GI and is 300x sweeter than sugar. I personally don’t like the aftertaste, however it is the safest natural sweetener out there.

My wish is this information serves you.

Your friend,

Isabel