Artificial sweeteners can make you actually eat more

Sydney: Researchers have identified a complex network
in the brain that has revealed why artificial sweeteners may not be the best
way to slim down.

Artificial sweeteners are substitutes for sugar that
provides a sweet taste like that of sugar while containing significantly less
food energy.

According to the researchers, the brain system responds
to artificially sweetened food by telling the animal it hasn’t eaten enough
energy, thus increasing the appetite and prompting them to actually eat more.

It senses and integrates the sweetness and energy content
of food, said the study conducted on mice and fruit flies.

“After chronic exposure to a diet that contained the
artificial sweetener sucralose, we saw that animals began eating a lot
more,” said lead researcher Greg Neely, Associate Professor at the
University of Sydney in Australia.

“Artificial sweeteners can actually change how
animals perceive the sweetness of their food, with a discrepancy between
sweetness and energy levels prompting an increase in caloric consumption,”
Neely added.

The findings showed that inside the brain’s reward
centres, sweet sensation is integrated with energy content. When sweetness
versus energy is out of balance for a period of time, the brain recalibrates
and increases total calories consumed.

For the study, fruit flies were exposed to a diet laced
with artificial sweetener for prolonged periods (more than five days). The
flies were then found to consume 30 per cent more calories when they were then
given naturally sweetened food.

The team also replicated the study using mice. The mice
that consumed a sucralose-sweetened diet for seven days displayed a significant
increase in food consumption, and the neuronal pathway involved was the same as
in the fruit flies.

“The chronic consumption of the artificial sweetener
actually increases the sweet intensity of real nutritive sugar which then
increases the animal’s overall motivation to eat more food,” Neely stated
in the work published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

Further, the artificial sweeteners were also found to
promote hyperactivity, insomnia as well as decrease the sleep quality -
behaviours consistent with a mild starvation or fasting state.

“The pathway discovered is part of a conserved
starvation response that actually makes nutritious food taste better when you
are starving,” Neely noted.

--IANS

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