Not in my experience. Sugar sure does though.

Another saccharin type study looks like.

12 week study ...
only male rats ...
seven packets for a rat = how much for a human?? 7 boxes?
and how much food was consumed with that or was the rat forcefed 7 packets worth straight up?

Gawds the media needs to take a few courses so they can get a clue separating science from "media fodder"

Yeah, speaking of sacharine, why exactly isn't THAT found in soft drinks anymore? It's a heck of a lot safer than aspartame!

I'd much rather they'd skip the rat studies (past the initial 'is this stuff pure poison or not?" stage) and just study humans who use splenda-containing products vs humans using other sweeteners.

It had a pretty bitter aftertaste. I remember the old Tab diet drink back in the 1970's it was pretty awful.

Well, it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to study rats in a controlled environment than to study free-living humans with a lot of other confounding factors. Many things could mess up their results in such an experiment, such as what else the subjects were eating, if they exercised, genetic susceptibility to various diseases, how they were raised, what their insulin resistance levels are, etc etc ad infiniteum. Not to say that it's an excuse, but that's the reasoning.

--Melissa

The studies showing aspartame is unsafe were funded by the sugar industry, too, just as the one absurd study of cyclamate that caused it to be banned in the US was funded by the sugar industry.

Sugar industry didnt need to take on saccharine -- it tastes nasty all on its own.

And I'll make a prediction -- any non-sugar, non-caloric sweetener found to taste good to the average person and approved as a sugar substitute will be "researched" and found dangerous. Any sugar substitute that has a taste problem, such as the extreme bitterness of saccharine, will not be "researched." "Research" will be funded by the sugar industries.

Just like the "Low Carb" or "0 Carb" was ordered off labels in Canada because it had no known health benefits so was judged misleading. As opposed to "Low Fat"????

Artificial sweeteners taste like sugar. Sugar stimulates insulin. This sugar/insulin interaction can become anticipatory i.e. Pavlovian. This means we can secrete insulin at the mere sight, smell, taste or even thought of sugar. Since artificial sweeteners taste like sugar, it's reasonable to conclude that they too stimulate insulin.

However, since they lack the carbohydrate, they can't cause fat accumulation. They can only cause fat loss to stall.

As far as damage AS can do, well I can only imagine what a synthetic molecule does to my cells.

Except it doesn't happen, at least not in studies. Lots of studies have been done on insulin and artificial sweeteners, only one stimulated insulin response, I think it was Ace-K... but I could be wrong about that.

These pages on wikipedia explain the Pavlovian response or classical conditioning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning

The Pavlovian response is not a direct cause/effect interaction. Instead, it's a response to conditioning.

The contention is not that AS stimulates insulin. The contention is that a mere sight, smell, taste or thought triggers insulin. We don't need to show that AS stimulates insulin. We only need to show that even in the absence of that which triggers insulin (sugar in this case), a mere thought can trigger insulin.

Pavlovian????????????????????

So, when I look at my sweet wife, I'm causing my blood sugar to go up..........

So, to achieve health, we need to abandon our thoughts, which means, we don't need to learn anything, right?

Whether a thought stimulates the release of insulin...

The fact is that in controlled studies people who consume artificial sweeteners, and therefore are conditioned to know AS makes foods taste sweet, do not have insulin releases in response to consuming AS. So perhaps a thought stimulates insulin production but consuming AS doesn't.

I guess the trick is to consume it mindlessly, without thought, eh?

I just read an article on a study done with a control group, a group worked hard on a specific muscle in weight training three times a week, and a group that had 'visualizations' instead of workouts. The control group didn't change. The workout group gained 28% in strength. The visualization group gained 24% in strength. (ref here)

I remember watching a documentary on a study done on basketball (shooting hoops) showing improvement merely by thinking about it consistently and directly, to nearly the same as those actually doing the practice.

I love that woo-woo stuff. :-)

The Pavlovian response is a potential; it is not a law. It is "possible" that "some" people will respond to a diet soft drink with insulin -- they may also respond with feeling more peppy despite drinking one without caffeine, for the same reason (or because something cold, sweet and fizzy can do that too). That doesn't mean everybody will (or every time).

P.S. rereading the initial post -- were they testing sucralose, or SPLENDA? Because who is to say what effect maltodextrin, or the process/combination of sucralose and maltodextrin, has?

I use sweetzfree... watered-down sucralose. Sometimes.

I could make a case about watching porn and a sexual response. In other words, hormones stimulated by the mere sight and sound of fictitious sexual activity. This would hardly constitute the exception but rather the rule about humans.

I agree that the Pavlovian response is only potential in that it's not innate but rather practiced. Yet it is so common in many aspects of our lives that it can be considered the rule.

"Just thinking about this makes me hungry"
"Just thinking about this makes me horny"
"Just thinking about this makes me mad"
"Just thinking about this makes me sad"
"Just thinking about this makes itch all over"
"Just thinking about this makes me shiver"