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I am honored and delighted to know some pretty awesome people and one of them is the amazing and brilliant dr. La Wade, who pens Phat Science and knows of which she speaks, as she's spent a lot of her professional white coat-wearing experience studying the effects of obesity and Type II diabetes. (Also, more importantly, she's damned hot on the dance floor). Wade has a follow up to an eyebrow raising study on the effects of saccharin on weight.
...the authors' interpretation of this all is that there is a Pavlovian conditioning phenomenon occurring here. They believe that when rats eat yogurt sweetened with sugar, their bodies learn that sugary taste is associated with the intake of calories, and they adjust their diet accordingly when presented with things that are sweet. In contrast, rats that eat saccharin yogurt do not develop this association, and so when they are presented with sweet foods their bodies don't expect them to have any calories.I don't know about you, but I read that and my jaw pretty much hit the desk!
How completely bizarre and whacked is that? If that's true, if we can
take from this the understanding that the mammalian body has the
ability to adapt and predict a non-caloric situation based on the taste
of saccharin, then the implications are mind boggling.
Wade points out that there's miles to go before these researchers sleep, and saccharin is certainly not the most prevalent artificial sweetener out there, but it kind of makes me want to drop artificial sweetener cold turkey. And also, send Diet Coke a scathing e-mail with the subject line of "WTF!??!" What if the more you drink diet soda, the more you NEED to drink diet soda? Whoa, it's starting to get a little grassy knoll in here, but still, doesn't that freak you out? Sometimes you just get the feeling that in two hundred years, people will look back at this time and shake their heads, like we do with the people who believed that smell caused disease or that infections could be cured via leeches. Seriously, Michael Pollan and Jack LaLanne are right: if a man makes it, don't eat it. 2 CommentsLeave a comment |
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I understand what this study is suggesting, and I find the results very interesting. The one thing I find very annoying about these studies on mice/rats/monkeys/etc. is that when you try to translate them onto humans you have the giant factor of the fact that the animals do not know what they are eating. They cannot read the labels or prepare the food themselves. We can do both. So, while our bodies might adapt a little and not get the calorie thing, our brains still can put two and two together and figure it out. While it's obviously not great to alter your body's settings like that, and sure, it could make a difference, there are other factors at work which are quite often ignored.
I have never had a good experience with artificial sweetners. My body completely rejects them anytime I have a diet product with artificial sweetener by breaking out in hives, itching, allergies, and headaches. I am not the only person that I know that have had these reactions. I take these reactions as signs that they are not good for my body and are poisonous. I think one day we will learn the truth, that these chemicals are not good for us.