Fake Sweeteners? Candy Cigarettes?

Want one reason for your beer belly? How about 100 quintillion? That's about how many bacteria live in your gut. And scientists now believe these bacteria can have a significant impact on your weight.

Consuming high amounts of fructose (a type of sugar), artificial sweeteners, and sugar alcohols (another type of low-calorie sweetener) cause your gut bacteria to adapt in a way that interferes with your satiety signals and metabolism, according to a new paper in Obesity Reviews. (If you've noticed you've been feeling tired all the time and gaining weight, your metabolism may be slowing.) "An evolution of the gut flora to this new sweetener-rich environment has a potential to negatively impact our health," says Amanda Payne, Ph.D., lead author of the review.

How does that happen? As bacteria in the gut process food, they give off byproducts called short-chain fatty acids. These can be beneficial and serve as energy in the body. But as the sweetener-adapted bacteria thrive and become more efficient at processing large amounts of high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and sugar alcohols, they also produce more and more short-chain fatty acids. (Not to imply that sugar is any better than artificial sweeteners.

In those high amounts, Payne says, short-chain fatty acids decrease satiety signals. "This signaling may cause disruptions in our feeling full and hence prevent us from stopping to eat when we should," Payne says.  http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/05/12548199-the-strange-reason-diet-soda-makes-you-fat

From other reading I've done, I think this analysis is legit.  Anything would be bad for you or good for you based on the dose and your circumstances at the time.  The right dose of gasoline when you are in a minimal survival situation and have gut loaded with parasites might save your life.  Most other times it would be bad.  Similarly, you can't live long without water.  But three gallons of water in a day is likely to kill you.  

Bottom line: if your body composition and/or health is not where you want it to be, there's a good reason not to eat/drink artificial sweeteners (or real ones).  On the other hand, if artificial sweeteners in low amounts helps you eat stay off of sugar, it may be a good compromise.  In the long run, I don't see a lot of folks having success with the paleo diet by using fake sugars, fake flours and other psedu-neolithic foods.  What seems to work better is continuing to work for genuinely paleo foods and meals that folks are excited about eating.

HT:  Kurt Harris for the candy cigs analogy 

How Much Do You Want That Diet Drink?

APM is metabolized in the gastrointestinal tract by

esterases and peptidases into three components: the amino

acids phenylanine and aspartic acid, and methanol [Ranney

et al., 1976].APMcan be also absorbed into the mucosal cells

prior to hydrolysis and then metabolized within the cell to its

three components which then enter circulation [Mattews,

1984]. Methanol is not subject to metabolism within the

enterocyte and rapidly enters the portal circulation and is

oxidized in the liver to formaldehyde, an highly reactive

chemical which strongly binds to proteins [Haschemeyer and

Haschemeyer, 1973] and nucleic acids [Metzler, 1977]

forming formaldehyde adducts. In a study, in which APM,

14C-labeled in the methanol carbon, was given orally to

adult male Wistar rats for 10 days, it was shown that the

carbon adducts of protein and DNA could have been

generated only from formaldehyde derived from APM

methanol. Moreover, it was suggested that the amount of

formaldehyde adducts may be cumulative [Trocho et al.,

1998].
http://www.ramazzini.it/ricerca/pdfUpload/APM%20administered%20in%20feed_Am.J.Ind.Med_2010.pdf

I've downed far too much of this stuff over the last 30 years.

Artificial Sweetners

The research shows that aspartame and other 'fake' sweetners can stimulate the 'anticipatory' insulin spike - a body used to big doses of sugar starts the insulin as self defense prior to ingestion, again when the food hits the mouth, and then again as blood sugar rises. It's a defense mechanism kind of like pavlov's dogs learned to salivate to the bell sound. So folks who too much sugars (average American - 150#/year) probably are not helping a ton by using aspartame etc.
I don't think one diet coke/day will kill you. That's what I shoot for as a max, it's a good day if drink none.

HFCS Beat Down

I've no sympathy for the HFCS folk, but this is not believable:

"Our bodies have been adapted over the years to metabolize sugar, which is natural,” Mr. Royster says. “But the body doesn’t know what to do with high-fructose corn syrup.”

It may be that large doses of HFCS are worse than large doses of sugar (table sugar, by the way, has almost as much fructose as HFCS), but the body is adapted to large quantities of neither one.

The link below highlights the pushback from the market place as folk begin to make their mistrust of HFCS known to food manufacturers.  I hope those folk don't quit pushing and learning until they figure out that all sugars are dangerous at present US consumption rates, and that most starches are nearly as dangerous as sugars, and then keep digging to learn about the unsustainable nature of our current food production industry, and about the benefits of grass finished beef ... etc!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02syrup.html

Sugar Substitutes

... "new research suggests that the body is not so easily fooled, and that sugar substitutes are no key to weight loss — perhaps helping to explain why, despite a plethora of low-calorie food and drink, Americans are heavier than ever.

"The new study, say the scientists, offers stronger evidence that how we eat may depend on automatic, conditioned responses to food that are beyond our control."

"What they mean is that like Pavlov's dog, trained to salivate at the sound of a bell, animals are similarly trained to anticipate lots of calories when they taste something sweet — in nature, sweet foods are usually loaded with calories. When an animal eats a saccharin-flavored food with no calories, however — disrupting the sweetness and calorie link — the animal tends to eat more and gain more weight, the new study shows. The study was even able to document at the physiological level that animals given artificial sweeteners responded differently to their food than those eating high-calorie sweetened foods. The sugar-fed rats, for example, showed the expected uptick in core body temperature at mealtime, corresponding to their anticipation of a bolus of calories that they would need to start burning off — a sort of metabolic revving of the energy engines. The saccharin-fed animals, on the other hand, showed no such rise in temperature. "The animals that had the artificial sweetener appear to have a different anticipatory response," says Susan Swithers, a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University and a co-author of the study. "They don't anticipate as many calories arriving." The net result is a more sluggish metabolism that stores, rather than burns, incoming excess calories."

"Swithers ... says that the study does suggest artificial sweeteners somehow disrupt the body's ability to regulate incoming calories. "It's still a bit of a mystery why they are overeating.""

"Though it's premature to generalize based on animal results that the same phenomena would hold true in people, Swithers says, she notes that other human studies have already shown a similar effect. A University of Texas Health Science Center survey in 2005 found that people who drink diet soft drinks may actually gain weight; in that study, for every can of diet soda people consumed each day, there was a 41% increased risk of being overweight." 

My take - if you have already done some work on what you eat (and are eating predominantly meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds), and are ready to take more steps, eliminate the fake sugar products to see what that gets you.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1711763,00.html#ixzz0kSYmc4XZ

Berardi on Sucralose

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/research-review-splenda-is-it-safe

Ever wish you knew more about Splenda aka sucralose? Voila. I think it is preferable to aspartame, but with any of these artificial sweetners, or real sweetners, the less the better.