How artificial sweeteners could be making you gain more weight
They are the non-sugar sweeteners we are told will cut calories and help us lose weight but new research shows they could actually be making you eat more.
Worse still artificial sweeteners may cause hyperactivity, insomnia and glucose intolerance.
A new study in fruit flies has found they consumed 30 per cent more calories when fed on a diet including artificial sweetener sucralose (Splenda).
University of Sydney Charles Perkins Researcher Professor Greg Neely says he was prompted to research the issue when he noticed his own stomach growling with hunger after he consumed a diet soft drink.
“In the 2000’s there were human population studies showing there could be these effects, but no-one had modelled it,” he said.
Research on fruit flies published in the journal Cell Metabolism has found a complex mechanism that involves the reward centre of the brain that can explain why artificial sweeteners may cause weight gain.
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If that reward centre measures sweetness coming in from food but does not find a similar increase in the energy coming into the body “it will demand more energy”, Professor Neely says.
In his fruit fly study flies on a sucralose diet consumed 30 per cent more calories, he says.
The research also found artificial sweeteners promoted hyperactivity insomnia, other behaviours that are consistent with a mild starvation or fasting state.
When you starve a fruit fly their brain won’t let them sleep because it thinks it needs more calories and it can’t get them when the fly is sleeping.
Flies on the sucralose diet behaved in the same way as if they were starving and had disturbed sleep as their body forced them to find more calories, he said.
A study on humans consuming artificial sweeteners in the late 1980’s found fourteen per cent of people using these sweeteners had insomnia or difficulty sleeping, he said.
In the last 30 years worldwide obesity has more than doubled with 50 per cent of the problem attributed to genetics and 50 per cent the environment.
“If obesity is doubling that is too fast for genetics alone and there must be something about the environment that is changing,” says Professor Neely.
He says it is possibly that one of those environmental phenomenon could be the increasing use of artificial sweeteners in diet food products.
Research published in the journal Nature in 2014 found artificial sweeteners alter the gut bacteria and metabolism of both humans and mice in a way that increases risk of obesity.
It found artificial sweeteners “may have directly contributed to enhancing the exact epidemic that they themselves were intended to fight”.
It found the increase in consumption in non-caloric artificial sweeteners coincided with the dramatic increase in the obesity and diabetes epidemic.
This article was written by Sue Dunlevy and initially appeared on news.com.au.