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This is an interesting follow-up question on post #83: Diet Sodas and Metabolic Risks: “I have heard that the intense sweet flavor of artificial sweeteners signals the body that there are a lot of carbohydrates coming. Since the diet soft drink provides none, a craving for them may be stimulated – hence the weight gain associated with sodas, diet or not. Have you heard this explanation before?”

Indeed, I have. I’ve seen a couple of studies suggesting that artificial sweeteners encourage the taste for sweet. I think these are preliminary and need further confirmation but the idea is consistent with trends. As I explain in the chapter on diet drinks in What to Eat, rates of overweight have risen in parallel with the increase in use of artificial sweeteners, so on a population basis, the chemicals don’t seem to do any good for weight trends. Individuals may find them helpful to control calorie intake, but on average most people seem to compensate–and overcompensate–for calorie savings from artificial sweeteners. After all, a teaspoon of sugar is only 16 calories and it doesn’t take much to compensate. When it comes to food, I don’t like anything artificial and I don’t like the way artificial sweeteners taste, so they are pretty low on my recommended list. I much prefer sugar, especially the brown crystalline kind.

My friend Michele Simon, author of Appetite for Profit, is now working for the Marin Institute, which describes itself as “alcohol industry watchdog.” She sends along a copy of the Institute’s new report on alcohol and energy drinks. In case you were wondering what’s in all those energy and sports drinks, why manufacturers want to add alcohol to them, and what their hazards are, especially to young adults, check this out. I think the drinks taste pretty bad on their own and the alcohol covers the taste, but this report lays out how the manufacturers deliberate target young adults for marketing campaigns that suggest mixing them with alcohol. The report covers the other ingredients in these drinks, things like guarana, ginseng, and–my favorite–taurine, an amino acid essential for cat reproduction.

The Framingham Heart Study has just released new results suggesting that people who drink one or more 12-ounce sodas a day have a greater chance of developing “multiple metabolic risk factors” such as obesity, high blood pressure (hypertension), high blood sugar (diabetes), or low HDL-cholesterol (the good kind). The story made headlines in USA Today and other publications because diet sodas–which have no calories–were associated with the same level of risk as that of sodas made with corn sweeteners. As might be expected, soda industry officials find this result ridiculous but I think it makes sense if you think of sodas–diet and not–as an indicator of poor dietary habits. Plenty of evidence suggests that many (although certainly not all) people who habitually drink sodas of any kind consume more calories, have worse diets, and are more likely to be overweight than people who do not. For some individuals, using artificial sweeteners helps maintain weight. But on a population basis, the huge increase in use of artificial sweeteners since the early 1980s has occurred precisely in parallel with rising rates of obesity. So lots of people must be making up for the calories they save in diet sodas by eating other junk foods. When it comes to food, I don’t care for anything artificial so I try to avoid artificial sweeteners as much as I can. And you?