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Do artificial sweeteners trick the body into overeating?

That's the hypothesis of an article in today's Wall Street Journal. This has been shown to be the case in rats:

In the latest study, researchers from Purdue University looked at whether artificial sweeteners disrupt the body's ability to "predict" the caloric consequences of a food. The study, published in the July issue of the International Journal of Obesity, involved young rats who were fed a steady diet of sweetened drinks for 10 days. One group of rats consumed only sugar-sweetened beverages. A second group received an inconsistent diet -- sometimes real-sugar drinks and sometimes drinks with no-calorie saccharin.

After 10 days, all the rats were given a real-sugar chocolate drink and rat chow. The rats with a history of eating both real sugar and artificial sweeteners ate three times the calories as the rats who always drank the real-sugar drink.

Now one shouldn't necessarily jump to conclusions based on a study of rats. As pointed out in the article, adult humans are alot smarter than rats. And I mention adults because there have been studies that babies are able to automatically regulate their caloric intake.

But I never did see the point of all these artificial foods containing fake sugar, and now they even have foots that contain fake fat. It seems healthier just to drink a naturally non-caloric drink if you don't want calories. You might try iced tea, carbonated water, or even the stuff that comes from the tap.

And there you see the commercial incentive behind getting people to drink diet soft drinks. Coke and Pepsi wouldn't make any money if people started drinking tap water.

I previously blogged about how Americans are not getting fatter. That post was about a New York Times article which explained that "contrary to popular opinion, national data do not show Americans growing uniformly fatter."

There's a lot of political correctness in the area of dietary health. The powers that be want you to believe that there's an "obesity epidemic" and the answer is to drink Diet Coke and eat foods that contain fake fat. If such an "epidemic" actually exists, why is it happening now that we are getting such good diet advice? Why were people thinner a generation ago when they didn't know to avoid fat and they didn't have sugar-free soft drinks?

posted Tuesday, June 29, 2004

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