Hacker News Reader

Comment by spfzero | Hacker News Reader

Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body that will then respond similarly than they would when encountering sucrose/fructose. Probably not all, but probably some. The insulin response seems like a good candidate and studies have shown people gain weight on diet sodas kind of the same as they do on sugared-sodas, so it is not out of the question that artificial sweeteners are not benign.

View on HN

In controlled studies (same caloric intake, ignoring the sweetened water), mice gain more weight with artificial sweeteners than with sugar.

Also, human studies have shown all of these sweeteners mess with metabolism, etc.

I’m not sure how this is still controversial. We knew all of this back in the early 1990s (if not earlier).

> In controlled studies (same caloric intake, ignoring the sweetened water), mice gain more weight with artificial sweeteners than with sugar.

they gave her high fat diet, which causes ketosis and that's likely why mice didn't gain weight https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/full/10.1139/apnm-2016-0346#.W...

Sure, but if using artificial sweeteners take me in a calorie deficit, I will lose weight. If I use sugars instead, that would give me more calories and I would gain weight.

The studies show the opposite. The caloric sweeteners make you hungry and slow down your metabolism.

Even if you are calorie counting (like the mice) the weight gain from lower metabolism is greater than the weight gain from having an equivalently sweet drink made from sugar.

High fructose corn syrup has a similar effect, but also delivers calories. If you want to drink soda, or eat sweetened things while losing weight, your best bet is to eat real sugar.

Sure, that makes sense in the short-term, but is overly reductive and does not take into account second-order effects that may matter in the long-term.

Calorie deficit will surely make you lose weight, but should only be taken as a guiding star when the goal is to lose weight and maintain it over the long-term.

> Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors

I wouldn't be so sure of that. The body has a wide variety of sensing systems, and many receptors come in variants. A selective agonist is a molecule that activates some variants more than the others. Such a common and useful thing that there is a name for it.

Exactly this.

Artificial sweeteners make your body go "Ooh incoming sugar!" and it "opens up" to receive huge amounts of energy in an easily digestible form.

When no sugar arrives, your body just grabs whatever it can, basically supercharging it's ability to suck out energy from any food.

The anecdotal advice I got was that it's OK to drink artificially sweetened drinks between meals as a snack, that way your body has nothing to grab. Just don't drink them with a meal, use water instead.

As a biologist, I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

I mean, you can have an insulin response to rising blood sugar levels, but that won't happen with artificial sweeteners since there is no sugar.

What biological mechanism are you referring to?

Your body is fooled into thinking it detects rising blood sugars, releasing insulin. But there is no rise in sugar, which might lead to hypoglycemia. At least, that's a plausible hypothesis. I think that has been confirmed in research, but I didn't check myself.

> Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body

Fool? Taste buds aren’t sentient. So maybe you mean “activate”? But even then, just because something has taste, that doesn’t imply anything else at all.

That is exceedingly pedantic, and not necessarily correct. The point is that taste buds exist to detect the presence of sugars like sucrose or fructose (and some other substances like sweet proteins), for their high caloric content and easy access to energy. Artificial sweeteners happen to activate those same receptors, but they are neither high in calories nor an easy way to access stored energy, so they are essentially "fooling" those detectors.

Just like we can say that an SQL Injection payload is fooling the server to perform some operation, without having to attribute actual intelligence to a simple program.

It's not pedantic, it's me fighting back against all these non-scientific logic shortcuts. Taste buds don't exist "to do" anything; they just exist. We can't anthropomorphize everything all the time, and then use those attributed human qualities to make our points.

"Taste buds want do taste sugar because they know how many calories sugar has, but they are fooled by this mean chemical, and it makes them feel bad, so blah blah blah." It gets so tiring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com