Sugar substitute can cause you to become overweight

Nowadays, many people devote enough time to healthy eating and limit their consumption of sweets, fats and preservatives. Many popular diets today suggest a complete rejection of sugar and products containing it. Instead of sugar, in such cases, various artificial substitutes are used, which are designed to reduce the calorie content during the preparation of sweet products and help people stick to a diet and stay slimmer.

Recent nutritional studies of sugar substitutes have shown that replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners can have the opposite effect to what you expect. Not only can sugar substitutes have harmful effects on the body, but they can also contribute to excess weight gain in people who regularly consume them.

Researchers from the American Purdue University (USA, Indiana) recently conducted a series of experiments to prove that a sugar substitute can cause excess weight. The first studies were conducted on small rodents: scientists divided 20 white rats into two equal groups, which were fed different foods for several months. The first group was fed a fermented milk product with regular white sugar, and the second - the same yogurt with the addition of saccharin. Saccharin is a product that is hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, but which, at the same time, is not absorbed by the living organism and is excreted intact. Like other artificial sweeteners, saccharin is not nutritious and does not contain calories. Artificial sweeteners contain virtually no carbohydrates, and when they hit the receptors of the tongue, they cause an instant sensation of sweetness. In addition to saccharin, there are acesulfame, cyclamate and other sugar substitutes.

Several months after the start of the study, the scientists noticed that the rodents that consumed the fermented milk product with a sugar substitute gained more weight than the rats that ate yogurt with sugar. The scientists also noticed that the rats that were fed the sugar substitute ate 2-3 times more than the rodents from the other group.

During the study, a group of scientists found out that the reason for the seemingly illogical outcome of the experiment is that a large number of artificial sweeteners are not able to affect the level of glucose in the blood and, accordingly, do not increase it. As a result, a person or animal does not feel full during the meal. The signal of satiety arrives to the brain somewhat later and the animal managed to eat a portion 2-2.5 times larger than the rodent that ate food with white sugar.

Scientists also warn that sugar substitutes can change the natural mechanisms of taste perception in the human body. Sweet taste can subconsciously help a person to estimate the possible caloric content of food, which cannot but affect the perception of taste and the rate of metabolism. Sugar substitutes "confuse" the body during the process of eating and a person's appetite can suddenly increase or metabolism can slow down. A person who is used to monitoring their diet and their weight pays attention to the caloric content of each product consumed, and sugar substitutes can lull vigilance, since due to the zero caloric content of, for example, saccharin, a person does not take into account the amount of the product eaten with it.

An additional point that confirms the negative impact of sugar substitutes on the health and weight of people who consume them is the statistics indicating the number of people suffering from obesity in countries where sugar substitutes are consumed more and more often every day.