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Many people, myself included, use sweeteners instead of sugar, as a way to reduce calories. I started replacing sugar with Splenda in my coffee over 10 years ago when I was in my first round with Weight Watchers. Truth be told, I’ve stuck with the Splenda even as the diets have come and gone, because I feel like it dissolves better in my iced coffee than other options. The main ingredient in Splenda is sucralose, which is actually 600 times sweeter than plain old sugar. And a new study shows another way in which sucralose differs from sugar: our brains don’t respond to the artificial sweetener with the same sated-feeling hormones as regular sugar. Which means you may actually end up hungrier using the sugar-substitute. Or as the study says, “non-caloric sweeteners, and sucralose specifically, interfere with normal appetite regulation in ways that could have adverse effects on weight control and health.” Oh dear lord, what have I done?
Our bodies and sugar: All cells in the body require glucose for energy. The brain is the biggest user, gobbling up to half of all sugars circulating in the blood. Nature, however, designed the brain to respond to natural sugars such as glucose found in whole fruits and some vegetables. Artificial sweeteners, therefore, appear to confuse the brain, [associate professor of medicine and pediatrics, director of the Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute at USC, and lead study author Dr. Katie] Page said, by sending signals of sweetness without delivering the needed calories the brain requires. Scientists have hypothesized that when those promised calories don’t arrive, the brain may send out a signal to eat more.
How they tested the theory: The new study … asked 75 people to consume one of three drinks on three separate occasions: plain water, water sweetened with table sugar (sucrose), and water sweetened with sucralose. During each visit, the research team tested participants’ fasting blood sugar levels, followed by a brain scan called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, which tracks blood flow to capture activity in different regions of the brain. “They came out of the scanner and consumed one of the three drinks, and went back into the scanner,” Page said.
Three drink minimum: One glass contained 300 milliliters of water and 75 grams (about 2.5 ounces) of sugar (sucrose), which is the equivalent of a 16-ounce can of sugary soda, Page said. Another drink contained enough sucralose to match that sweetness. Sucralose is about 600 times sweeter than sugar, according to the US Food and Drug Administration. The third drink was plain water, which served as a control. During the brain scanning, Page and her team did another round of blood sampling at 10 minutes, 35 minutes and 120 minutes after consuming the drink and asked participants to rate their hunger level.
‘No signal’ telling us we’re full: In addition to finding that drinks with sucralose increased the sensation of hunger by about 17%, Page and her team found increased connections to other parts of the brain responsible for controlling motivation. “Sucralose appears to affect your decision-making skills,” Page said. “For example, we found increased brain connectivity between the hypothalamus and the anterior cingulate cortex, which controls the risks and rewards of a decision.” In addition, blood tests showed sucralose had no effect on hormones the brain uses to tell when we are satisfied and no longer hungry, Page said. “There’s no signal, no signal at all,” she said. “There’s a sweetness signal, but there’s no hormone signal telling you you’re full. Sucralose doesn’t have an effect on those hormones.”
Aha, I knew there was something wonky going on between my hypothalamus and anterior cingulate cortex! At least I can finally put the blame on Splenda for making me feel hungrier and thus overindulging (as opposed to the myriad of other questionable gastronomic choices I make even in the absence of Splenda). But as is true in most things, moderation is the goal, rather than elimination. The experts in the article underscored the point that the best possible diet doesn’t include a lot of added sugar to begin with, which in turn should reduce the amount of sugar to be replaced with sucralose. That being said, they suggested a good starting point of trying to suss out foods where extra sugar and/or sucralose may be an unexpected, added ingredient. Things like salad dressings and pasta sauces. You heard me, Nicholas Sparks, salad dressing! This news must be an especially hard blow to the author, who notoriously uses eight(!) packets of Splenda in his chicken salad recipe. I guess the question is, what has he been eating after the Splenda-ed salad?
Splenda in chicken salad? Ew. I mean…why use sugar in chicken salad at all??
I use Splenda in my morning tea because as you say Kismet it dissolves better, but otherwise I use plain old sugar, or brown sugar if a recipe calls for it. I follow Julia Child’s mantra that it’s better to have a little bit of fully flavored (salt, butter, sugar, whatever) something than to have a large quantity of crap with fake flavors…
I also thought I read that fake sugars like Sucralose are actually really bad for the liver?
Splenda is made using chloridine and destroys your gut bacteria, which is where most of your immune system resides. Books have been written on it. Not good. Stick with stevia.
Chlorine, sorry.
Sugar/sweeteners are added to foods that don’t need it to make it addictive and less satisfying. The addition of sugar tricks people into inadvertently eating more calorically dense foods in greater quantities. Sweeteners, in one form or another, are added to almost all ultra processed foods which compose the majority of Americans diets. As a society we really need an honest exploration of ultra processing/corporate greed deliberately fueling obesity and less fat shaming of food addicts and obese people.
I’m from the UK and spent years travelling for work, I’ve always been a fan of picnic dinners rather than room service/eating out on trips plus bonus visits to local grocery stores (honestly a highlight of any trip abroad for me). It never ceased to shock me how sweet American food is. I’d buy a yogurt that looked exactly like one I can buy at home and BAM sweetness like I’ve never tasted before. Bleugh.
Sugar companies and food companies in the US have really done a number on you.
This research does not shock me at all, we can try and trick our bodies but our biology knows when something is up.
I also do the grocery store visit for a picnic when on holiday or traveling for business. A corner bodega in NYC is cheaper than room service as well as an interesting side trip.
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But this story reminds me of a 60Minutes feature Morley Safer covered years ago, about a multi-billion$-yr business: Givaudan. It’s still on YT on the CBSNews channel, titled “The Flavorists: Tweaking Tastes and Creating Cravings”.
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I’m betting many of these Sucralose beverages combine this taste tweaking to up the consumption [& corporate profit margins] @ the expense of our health
This is how we travel, too.
As to the sweet stuff, when you live there, it’s so pervasive (even if you eat your own cooking, you just expect food elsewhere to be sweet) that you don’t really notice it. It was only after I left that I did and my wake up call was with bread: I couldn’t find any bread whether it was from a grocery store or baker that didn’t have some kind of sugar in it. The sugar industry has done a number on us, ITA.
adding to ML’s discussion points. I believe it’s the documentary Food, Inc which demonstrated how the Sugar Industry / Lobbyists behave like the Tobacco Industry / Lobbyists from decades before. And their maneuvers manage to remain persistently (&criminally) below the radar because eating is a necessity, while smoking/vaping is an optional habit for the public at large.
This effect has been known for a while and the author of this study isn’t quite giving the full picture. Notice that in the study the effect was studied using only drinks with various types of sweeteners. The issue is that your body does indeed expect calories when it tastes sweet. The issue is drinking an artificially sweetened drink by itself. This is what triggers the hunger. Having one alongside food with calories is fine. Using artificial sweeteners in food that has other calories is fine.
Yes, I remember this coming out like 15 years ago.
I feel like I’m going insane because I truly thought this was common knowledge from YEARS ago, yet I keep seeing it discussed as if this study is groundbreaking. Did I imagine reading about it a decade ago?
This article totally makes sense. I’ve been putting stevia in my tea and coffee for a long time. The only thing is that stevia and sucralose are not the same thing and stevia does not have sucralose in it. (I read the headline & kind of worried and looked it up, but still stevia is not fabulous as I thought so thanks)!