Artificial Sweeteners May Raise Health Risks

People believe that consuming artificial sweetened beverages is better for you but….

Artificial sweeteners actually put people at an increased risk for a number of chronic diseases. If sugar substitutes are used enough, it can lead to an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, excessive weight gain, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Susan E. Swithers, PhD of Purdue Unversity said in a recent opinion piece, "This somewhat counterintuitive result may reflect negative consequences of interfering with learned relationships between sweet tastes of and typical post-ingestive outcomes, which may result in impaired ability to compensate for energy provided when caloric sweeteners are consumed."

 

"It is not uncommon for people to be given messages that artificially-sweetened products are healthy, will help them lose weight or will help prevent weight gain," said Swithers. "The data to support those claims are not very strong, and although it seems like common sense that diet sodas would not be as problematic as regular sodas, common sense is not always right."

People who regularly consume artificial sweeteners show altered activation patterns in the brain’s pleasure centers in response to sweet taste, suggesting that these products may not satisfy the desire for sweets. Similarly, studies in mice and rats have shown that consumption of noncaloric sweeteners dampens physiological responses to sweet taste, causing the animals to overindulge in calorie-rich, sweet-tasting food and pack on extra pounds.

Taken together, the findings suggest that artificial sweeteners increase the risk for health problems to an extent similar to that of sugar and may also exacerbate the negative effects of sugar. "These studies suggest that telling people to drink diet sodas could backfire as a public health message," Swithers says. "So the current public health message to limit the intake of sugars needs to be expanded to limit intake of all sweeteners, not just sugars."

 

Trends Endocrinol Metabol. Published online July 10, 2013