Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

It might sound like a difficult feat if you are watching your calorie intake, but new research from Purdue University shows that consumption of artificial sweeteners creates a physiological reaction that makes you GAIN weight instead of lose it.

Honestly, when I saw this article from Times Online, I didn’t believe it.

• How artificial sweeteners may be making slimmers put on weight – Times Online

I wanted to see the research. I wanted to see the data and that article didn’t provide it. Fortunately, I found the data from Purdue University itself:

• Purdue University Research on Artificial Sweeteners

This research was published in Behavioral Neuroscience 2008, Vol. 122, No. 1, 161–173. I worked in a research lab for a few years, so I can make out what happened in this experiment. The most telling of all is the graph of Cumulative Body Weight Gain, but it was too confusing if you haven’t slogged through the experiment method to find out which group is which. I did the slogging for you.

• Non-Predictive – Rats fed yogurt with artificial sweetener half the time and unsweetened the other half. “Rats in the sweet nonpredictive group received plain, unsweetened yogurt for 3 of the 6 days each week that yogurt was provided and received yogurt sweetened with 0.3% saccharin for the other 3 days that week.”

• Predictive – Rats fed yogurt with sugar half the time and unsweetened the other half. “Rats in the sweet predictive group received plain, unsweetened yogurt (approx. 0.6 kcal/g) for 3 of the 6 days each week that yogurt was provided and received yogurt sweetened with 20% glucose (wt/wt; approx. 1.2 kcal/g) for the other 3 days that week.”

• Predictive Control – Rats fed only sugar sweetened yogurt. “The sweet predictive control group, was included to control for the total number of calories from the yogurt supplement per week (approximately 104 kcal per week). This group received only yogurt sweetened with 20% glucose (wt/wt; approx. 1.2 kcal/g) on the 3 days per week that rats in the sweet nonpredictive group received sweetened yogurt (i.e., this group did not receive any unsweetened yogurt).”

The rats that gained the most weight were the rats in the Non-Predictive group (artificial sweetener). Even though their calorie intake was the same as the same as the Predictive Control group and LESS than the Predictive group, they were significantly fatter.

What they found was that the artificial sweetener makes your body less able to regulate energy. Have you ever wondered how you could be eating so little, exercising so much and STILL gaining weight? This could be the problem.

Unfortunately, they have no data on whether you can reset your body to regulate energy correctly. Since it took about two to five weeks for the effect to take place in the rats, I’m hoping that a month and a half off artificial sweeteners might reset my body.

For years, Atkins recommended that you stay away from artificial sweeteners. He figured that the taste of sweetness caused you to crave sugars. Other nutritionists recommended staying away from artificial sweetened foods as well. Their logic was that you might overeat other foods because you were “good” and drank a diet soda. They had good instincts, if not good reasons.

After seeing this research, I’m cutting artificially sweetened foods out of my diet completely. Medical research may not know if I’m permanently damaged from drinking Diet Coke almost my whole life, but I’m going to do the best I can to fix it from here.