How Artificial Sweeteners Can Make You Gain Weight
Splenda may not be as harmless as you thought.
A number of experiments done by a number of researchers showed that artificial sweeteners could be responsible for changing the way we perceive taste, per its effect on the brain.
In one, a group fruit flies were kept on a diet of artificial sweeteners, while another group ingested food with natural sugar. After just five days, the fruit flies who were fed sucralose (the fake shit) started eating 30% more calories than their counterpart.
Evidently, when the brain is exposed to foods that are supposed to be sweet, it begins to start confusing what kind of nutrition its receiving, and recalibrates to make up for the imbalance between sweetness and calories. So your cravings require more artificially sweetened food than you would if you had the natural stuff.
A similar study was done on mice, but researchers also found that after the mice were fed artificial sweeteners for a while, any time they’d eat something that was naturally sweetened, there would be more activity shown in scans of their brain—meaning that the real stuff tasted even better afterwards.
“These findings further reinforce the idea that ‘sugar-free’ varieties of processed food and drink may not be as inert as we anticipated,” the study’s author Herbert Herzog told Forbes. “Artificial sweeteners can actually change how animals perceive the sweetness of their food, with a discrepancy between sweetness and energy levels prompting an increase in caloric consumption.”
So far, studies have only been done with mice and fruit flies, but scientists are pretty sure that their research correlates to the human body as well. Do yourself a favor and skip the Splenda from now on.
