14 DAY TRIAL // Drinking only "zero" beverages and gorging only on the "lightest" yogurts and diet bars, and still having a seal line? No wonder, as a new research published in the journal "Behavioral Neuroscience" has revealed that rats fed on artificial sweetener put more weight compared to sugar-fed rats, a finding challenging common concepts saying that artificial sweeteners can help people lose weight or keep it off while following a diet.
The American team from Purdue University in the US can only guess that a sweet taste followed by no calories may induce into the body a crave for supplementary food. The investigations revealed that sugar-fed rats subsequently had decreased appetite compared to mice that consumed sweeteners.
The research team offered yogurts to different groups of rats, some sweetened with sugar, others with saccharin. The mice could eat as much as they wanted, not being restricted in their food intake. Surprisingly, the saccharin-fed mice ate higher amounts of food, put on more fat, and got more extra-weight than the sugar-fed individuals.
"The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharin can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with higher calorie sugar. One theory was that, in normal conditions, the arrival of a sweet taste in the mouth helped prime the metabolism for the arrival of a calorie-heavy, sweet meal into the digestive system," wrote the authors.
"When the meal does not arrive the body may get confused and have more trouble regulating its appetite when other food is around. If this were the case, other low-calorie sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame could have a similar effect," they added.
Old ideas are hard to change, and some people are not convinced so easily.
"This needs far more research - as studies in humans have shown that low-calorie sweeteners can help people lose weight," a spokesman for the British Nutrition Foundation told BBC News.