I guess it was too good to be true....no wonder Diet Coke causes stalls in some.

The jist is that artificial sweeteners activate the sensors in the gut that absorb glucose, since they act like sugar. This causes the intestines to extract more sugar (glucose) from your diet. Making the whole point of splenda, et al moot.

I am an avid consumer of fake sugar but will be cutting it out of my diet completely from now on. Interested to see if it will affect weight loss.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...eight-loss.html

Artificial sweeteners 'do nothing to help weight loss'

Artificial sweeteners do nothing to help weight loss as our bodies cannot distinguish between them and sugar, according to new research.

By Chris Irvine
Published: 7:00AM BST 03 Sep 2009

Professor Soraya Shirazi-Beechey, from the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Liverpool, found that a sweet taste receptor, present in the taste cells of the gut, allows humans and animals to detect glucose within the intestine.

Artificial sweeteners behave in a similar way to sugar however, and activate the sensors in the gut key to glucose absorption.

The receptor also detects artificial sweeteners in foods and drinks, resulting in increased intestinal intake of dietary sugars. This could explain why artificial sweeteners are unsuccessful at helping people lose weight, and sometimes result in weight gain.

Professor Shirazi-Beechey said: "If someone wants to lose weight, I don’t think artificial sweeteners are going to help.
"My recommendation is to eat natural foods, but to eat less of them."
Prof Shirazi-Beechey said: "Artificial sweeteners can also activate the glucose sensor and increase the capacity of the intestine to absorb more sugar.
"You drink diet cola to stay slim but the reverse is true, because the artificial sweeteners can activate the sensor, so you are taking more glucose from your diet."
Prof Shirazi-Beechey's research can be seen at an exhibition at the Food Museum in Switzerland. The exhibition, called Research Food – a Dialogue, looks at food history, science and technologies.

Yea - I had a feeling. I've been stalled at 308 for several weeks, and I've been having issues with water retention. Gradually, I'm reducing sodium-rich foods from my daily intake, and trying like heck to not add salt to my food. But I've also been drinking copious amounts of decaf at work with light cream and Splenda (2 packs in a 20 oz. mug). I find it to be very satisfying, and I've been drinking around 72 oz. plain water to flush the excess sodium from my body.

However - I'm still stalled. Looks like one more food additive will be removed from my cabinet. And I just got done buying two bottles of sugar free Torino syrups!

I'm not eating sugar along with my non-caloric sweeteners, so I don't quite see how this would apply.

There is another thread along similar lines.

http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=401071

Yeah that's what I was wondering. OK so it might "increase" the amount of sugar you get from other foods in your stomach at the same time. But if you're not eating much in the way of sugar/carbs at the same time, how would that even apply? And if you were eating, what, 5? Even if it magically absorbed 'more' of the 5 carbs, what drastic effect would this have? Seems to me you'd have to have numbers so substantial that it'd hardly qualify as anything resembling lowcarb, in order for this to 'matter' even if it's true. Maybe I just don't get it.

From the evolutionary perspective, sugar is a very important nutrient. It's the only macronutrient that the body absorbs even against a concentration gradient. It makes no sense that artificial sweeteners would increase sugar absorption. The body does that quite efficiently. I suppose somehow artificial sweeteners could stimulate increased appetite but I don't see how. I thought the point of a lowcarb diet was that it suppressed one's desire for sugar.

The article's author even says, "My recommendation is to eat natural foods, but to eat less of them."

I guess there must be some sweet cravings happening for people to use some dubious artificial laboratory concoction 100's of times sweeter than actual sugar.



I wonder how the body deals with the situation where it is looking for the glucose in the intestines (activated by the artificial sweet taste) and can't find any or much. Seems like an imbalance the body might be inclined to rectify... somehow.




It may also be the very addictive caffeine (DC has about 45 mg per).
Some info about caffeine and weight control with links to studies and info about its relationship with cortisol, IR, stress, sleep interference and more:

http://www.teeccino.com/weightloss.aspx

They are selling a coffee sustitute so they are biased but the studies are there. Personally I have found that product way too sweet (dates) and I never used it beyond one try.

Info on heart disease as well:
http://www.teeccino.com/heart.aspx

I'm not sure the original source is particularly relevant to any question here. The only "degree of sweetening power" that matters is what you are using in your food. If someone uses a few drops of prepared stevia in a refrigerated dropper bottle to get the palate-sweetness equivalent of 3 tsp of sugar, I don't think it really matters that the raw stevia plant's "pure" chemicals are up to 300x sweeter than sugar. Why is that trivia relevant?

I think the same can be said for anything. I sometimes use sweetzfree (sucralose) which is basically 1 drop = ~1 tsp of palate sweetness (depending. Sometimes I think that's a high estimate). It's true that in its pure-undiluted form sucralose is much sweeter than sugar, but I'm not eating it in that form, nor are people who use Splenda.

doctorK: eating lowcarb and low-allergen for that particular body will remove "triggers" that cause "cravings" and "binges" and other eating problems for the most part. 'The taste of sweet' is a common craving and yes if you lowcarb properly the 'extreme' (craving) of that will vanish. --

...However that doesn't mean that it removes all palate interest in the taste of something sweet. A person can eat an apple or chocolate without necessarily "craving" it, but simply knowing they will enjoy it, and sometimes having hormonal or emotional or other reasons for wanting something their body enjoys in that way. Most people have spent decades developing their palate and a lifetime with food skewed toward high-sweetness as part of that. That basic lifetime of preferences is not usually changed by lowcarb; what IS changed is how the body reacts to current food. Which usually makes a huge difference. But that does not remove the market for sweet, which is hard-wired into most.

It is relevant because it suggests that it is wholey unnatural... and that you are likely getting a sweeter tase than you would if you used sugar.

As one who eats sugar occasionally - I've never experience a dose of artificial sweeterner that wasn't much, much sweeter than sugar.

Of course, the real point is why eat it at all when there are negative findings, when the track record of artificial processed foods (it is a sugar replacement) is not so good, and when many health consious doctors recommend against many of them - while eating a diet that supposedly reduces cravings for sweets.

Oh yes, you should see a world of difference in your weight, your mood, your skin, your well being.. getting rid of AS will make a new woman out of you!!!

The herb stevia btw, is sweeter than sugar, but no where near the level of AS unless it's processed/refined:

http://www.stevia.com/SteviaArticle.asp?Id=2269

Why is sugar more natural than stevia? I see nothing except engrained cultural bias for that. Table sugar has little resemblance to eating sugar cane, any more than stevia in a powder has resemblance to the stevia plant. You have to refine the canes you grow in the field to get the degree of sweetness in a sugar cube.


Perhaps that's true, but the alternatives are simply lacking; I've also never experienced a low carb bread that wasn't much worse tasting than 'real' bread -- that 'real' term being completely subjective of course -- but if you're avoiding real bread you learn to adapt to what you have. It's possible there is a 'sweeter' taste in non-sugar alternatives than in sugar itself, but I don't believe that's why people use them; they use them because they are avoiding actual sugar, much like most lowcarbers avoid actual bread. (And that argument doesn't work against Erythritol which is LESS sweet than sugar.) I don't believe this is an indicator that some problem exists causing this 'distortion in taste' or something, I think it's an indicator that when you are avoiding a certain element you just have to use the substitutes available, whatever their nature.

I personally find increased sweetning power a good thing: if sucralose is not ideally healthy -- and I seriously doubt it is -- then the ability to have '3 drops which are mostly water' of it vs. spoonfulls of it seems like a good thing as it seriously reduces how much of it you're ingesting.


Well, at this point the negative findings have not seemed to overwhelm the usefulness of having another sweetness source. If a person "perceives" health issues stemming from non-sugar sweeteners I'm sure that makes it a lot easier to reject (much like gluten usually has to be openly perceived as doing harm before people can accept it's really BAD for them and stop eating it, and many still do even then). If they don't perceive personal health issues from ingesting non-sugar sweeteners, then yeah it seems like it probably isn't ideal, but if the harm isn't considerable enough to make up for the perceived value of sweet as an option, then that's not going to be a decisive factor.

As for negative findings, you can find research saying anything about anything it seems. There are studies showing that some AS's "can" have effect XYZ for "some" people but the same could be said about peanuts. I think probably all artificial sweeteners are not contributive to health -- if not harmful in some hopefully small way -- but I don't necessarily apply that to Stevia, which is as 'real' as sugar cane -- which is to say neither of them are any good for you, and while I'm sure eating sugar instead of stevia may have some perceived greater-moral food value for you is my impression, I'm not sure sugar is objectively that much better for you than stevia, in the end.


I think it DOES lessen cravings for sweets. A craving is a very extreme response, and 'sweets' per-se usually implies candy or desserts or pastries or something.

Many of the things lowcarbers use alternative sweeteners for are not desserts, but things which have a degree of sweet in them (eg marinades, lowcarb ketchup or teriyaki, even blue cheese salad dressing has a teeeny bit of sweet that leans against the salt) or things which people often naturally prefer some sweetness to counteract bitterness in (coffee), or small amounts in recipes which would simply taste lousy without that.

Now taste is subjective of course. What might be barfable to one person without sweetener might taste great to you. If you absolutely withheld every drop of perceived sweetener from a person for a long time it's possible their tastes would shift so radically that they would then prefer their entire diet to have zero sweetness. One could suggest that people eat zero sugar intake in any form just to do that. But to me that's akin to drinking beer or coffee which are disgusting, repeatedly, all for the sake of eventually "learning to like them" because it's culturally cool to do so. Anything can grow on you. The number of people willing to ingest something repeatedly which they actively dislike is not 100% though.

I believe personally that would drop the adherence rate of lowcarb as an eating plan through the floor, statistically.

I think there is enough science on actual 'taste' that any comparative opinion about it is pretty subjective. Some people think vegetables have a certain sweetness and chocolate is so rich they can hardly stand it. Other people think vegetables taste like bitter dirt and it's nearly impossible to over-rich them on sweet. Some people love actual bitter foods like coffee and some people can only tolerate them if 'mitigated' by dairy and/or sweet.

Most people are limiting carbohydrates in their diet. Or fructose, or both. So table sugar is not an attractive option. Other sweeteners including Stevia are simply alternatives without the carbs.

I think some people are stalled and have other health issues from one or more non-sugar sweeteners -- although maybe a different option of them, they wouldn't react to, who knows. I just don't think that goes for everybody.

Some good points.

I'm just deeply distrustful of artificial "foods".
I never bought the margarine or vegetable oil business and never got how anyone else could have... it seemed unnatural to me to be able to extract some high quantities of seed/grain/legume oil using heat and toxic solvents. And then hydrogenating some of them. How could this be better than traditional fats (or very low use of them) or fats that have a long history of use and would likely be around. Because some guys in white coats say so?

Sugar, the results of evaporated sugar cane juice, is junk... but I'd rather have a little of that devil than one I don't know or understand what it is doing to the body. Sugar-wsie, the importance to me is that I don't crave it, and that is what I worked on, and I use it in a non-craving context.

I think if people are 'craving' anything it represents a problem. Once a month I realllllllly want chocolate and that's probably a problem, but I figure the Diet Gods need to take that up with Hormone Gods and leave me out of it, so I eat a little chocolate, albeit now that I'm lowcarb it's dark chocolate (which has taken quite awhile to adapt to) in small amounts such as drizzled over a few strawberries, rather than in large amounts in candy.

But again, craving vs. wanting are not the same thing. I think the "implied" part of some of this thread is that if someone is ingesting non-sugar sweeteners that they must be doing this as a result of constant cravings or something. I don't think that's why most people ingest them. I think most people LIKE sweet, and most people either want sweet or often want a family-shared food others will like and they can eat too. I don't call that a craving. I've had a lot of cravings in my life thanks to food intolerances -- for milk, for wheat -- and unless I am low on oxygen or haven't eaten in two days, 'craving' something sweet is actually pretty rare for me.

Even desire for sweet is greatly diminished in me by very lowcarb, very low sweet, heavy on protein eating. Then again desire for everything is since that kills much of my appetite as well.

If a person is able to lose weight and improve their health while ingesting non-sugar sweeteners, then even if they WERE craving-driven (eg people who drink a lot of diet soda), then I am not complaining anyway. Yeah if they drank water they'd be healthier. But then again if lowcarb forced them to drink only water they might not stay on lowcarb and lose the weight at all. So I see it as a compromise of sorts.

I'd like to see a full study on that.

From what i get from the article, when you are consuming artificial sweeteners, more of the glucose you get from carbs will be stored as adipose tissue (fat). even if it's true it wouldn't make a signifficant inpact on low carb, since the amount of carbs in what you eat is extremely low. 25-30g of carbs are not a whole lot of glucose.

quite honestly i believe in artificial sweeteners can cause cravings in SOME people and thus lead to overeating, but i really, really doubt they are fatteing in and by themselves. at least i'll stick to that beleif untill i'll see further studies directly linking them to weightgain (í.e 100 adults consuming a 2500 calorie CONTROLLED diet and drinking 1½l of Coke Zero or whatever daily, versus 100 adults consuming 2500 calories pr day drinking nothing but plain water)