Isn’t one of the major issues with sweeteners of any sort that they increase appetite? That’s how zero calorie sweeteners contribute to weight gain, right?
That’s how they can contribute to weight gain. They can make you feel like you’re free to “sweet it up”, and dive headlong into sugar rush city, increasing your dependency on sweetness. You might end up binging on high-carb and/or high-fat foods, to get your fix because you’re sold on the “zero added sugar” claim, and ignoring the wheat and palm oil that are still there. Or, your addiction makes you desperate enough to stil eat full-sugar items regularly, because you can’t resist the craving that your addiction to constant sweets has built, and you figure that it’s such a small percentage of all the sweets that you eat, that it “doesn’t matter”, even though you’re doing it once a week or however often.
But sugar substitutes can also contribute to weight loss, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t go gung-ho when given a free license, maintains their dietary patterns, and simply replaces out the sweets for lower-calorie equivalents.
As knowledge about the above discrepancy becomes more widespread, hopefully, the awareness helps to shift more people into the 2nd group, because they’re aware of the hazard.
I was referring to something I personally experience. I will eat more French fries (or whatever) if they are accompanied by a Coke Zero than I will with a glass of water.
I suppose that makes sense. I’ve heard that a strategy to quit smoking is to disallow yourself from doing it at times where it would accentuate some other positive experience like eating food, hanging out with buds, etc.
So, this is kinda what i was referring to when I said, “it depends, people are different". I think that people who aren’t regular users of non-caloric sweeteners are more likely to retain the naive metabolic response of tasting "sweet” and expecting to get that sugar-kick, and to be inclined to eat more if they don’t get it.
I read a rat study years ago where that had clearly happened: there were three cohorts of rats. All had free access to rat chow. But some were given water to drink, others sugar water, and the third group saccharine water. (This was a long time ago, when saccharine was the primary artificial sweetener in the US.) The rats in the third group consumed the most calories. Those in the second group got extra calories from the sugar, but reduced their consumption of rat chow. Those in the third group increased their consumption of rat chow.
But lots of people are accustomed to eating fake sugars. And also, lots of people regulate their food intake using tools other than, “am i still hungry?". They look at the size of the portion, they set goals for how much they will eat when. And i think a lot of these people don’t eat any more when they replace sugary drinks with non-caloric sweet drinks. And some recent human studies support that, lots of people don’t eat more when they are drinking diet Coke. I even know people who lost weight just by replacing their regular soda with diet soda.
You (and i) are probably like the rats. But a lot of people aren’t.
And, in this use case of modest added sugar intake you believe pure glucose is preferred to a a mixture of glucose and fructose why?
I get that very high loads of fructose delivered rapidly can overload the liver’s ability to process, especially if coupled with high alcohol and/or fat intake. But that is not the case with a homemade cookie or a teaspoon in a cup of coffee or tea.
I have beat the following drum frequently here, but I think the issue is that sweet (along with fat and salty in combinations) hits the brain’s “hedonic center” hard. That’s the part that drives eating more and the amount of “sweet” with added sugars is, from the evolutionary timescale POV, a supranormal stimulus. Couple that with the fact that in the American diet high in ultraprocessed foods there is little that hits the brain’s “satiety center” to significant degrees. Real foods are more moderate on the hedonic scale and often much higher in satiety. So yeah add a big hedonic signal during a meal with nothing added as satiety signal and often that means eating more.
But the clear association of high amounts of added sweeteners to neurodegenerative diseases morbidity and mortality is beyond that.
Personally, drinking diet cola does not seem to stimulate my appetite. Exercise sometimes does, if it is intense.
I think the body is well adapted to digest natural amounts of sugar including fructose from whole fruit and milk lactose (for me personally). I agree with the bulk of Lustig’s^ original biochemical argument about high levels of table sugar and fructose. The best solution is to eat less sweet stuff. A reasonable alternative is to use less fructose when preparing desserts at home, which I don’t do that often these days. Substituting glucose is very easy and not expensive or difficult to do.
^As a paediatrician you are likely familiar with his original arguments. I read his first book. It is possible his views have become flakier with time, as sometimes happens once views are well received in certain niches. I do not know, so am not agreeing with any idea Lustig has ever proposed.
So for the very high sugar consumer as the ones you are talking about?
True in both senses - eat less of the sweet stuff … and eat stuff that is less sweet!
I agree a cookie or donut or chocolate bar is a harmless treat. This is not the same as a regular habit of a giant bag of cookies or a dozen Krispy Kremes. I am fortunate I often prefer savoury snacks. I don’t think sugars cause every malady they are blamed for, but think the case is stronger for fatty liver and some cases of diabetes. Not sure about hyperactivity.
A Coke Super Big Gulp has, what, 72g of sugar? Drinking five a week, not that unusual, is a lot of extra fructose.
Ditto here. I lost 60 pounds this year, and diet drinks (along with bubbly water) were part of the regimen. I didn’t feel any appetite stimulation (in fact, I probably found them sating , but that may be the carbonation), but I also do not have much of a sweet tooth. I tend to take a pass at sugary things except in drinks, and I prefer the taste of artificial sugars as they are more “dry” and thin in mouthfeel to me. I think this is definitely a case of YMMV.
So first off the callback to Lustig’s emphasis on huge fructose loads got me to search for old discussions here on that. Here’s my original thinking looking in the way back machine-
And I still believe that is correct with two additional factors as well.
The first is again those hedonic and satiety centers and how ultraprocessed foods, often very sweet, definitely high hedonic value and low satiety, drive more intake overall. That is relevant to this comment:
It is simply difficult for many to eat a cookie.
But it is becoming increasingly clear to me that very high stimulation of sweet receptors (located broadly not just on the tongue) and the parts of the brain that react, very probably have harmful impacts whether that stimulation comes directly with large calorie loads or is completely non-nutritive. Beyond those other factors. Impact that seems to especially play out with chronic neurodegenerative morbidity and mortality.
Your hunch may be right. But these complex multifactorial things are not easy, cheap or quick to properly test. 150 years ago, the US life expectancy was about 39.4 years (as estimated by Statista). That’s a huge change in a very short time.
It’s important to remember that a big reason why life expectancy numbers were so low was that there were much higher levels of infant and child mortality than we see today.
Improvements in healthcare, vaccines, etc. have certainly also helped adults to live longer (and better) since then, but my understanding is that, even 100 or 150 years ago, if a person survived childhood, they typically could expect to live into their 60s or 70s.
So, to me at least, this gets very interesting. After I wrote that I thought to myself “Self. I wouldn’t be shocked if we start to hear of research on the role of these widely distributed sweet taste receptors in neurodegenerative diseases. … maybe already?” And dayum.
Big role for these receptors in cognitive function and maintenance of those networks with those researchers specifically looking at their possible place in impacting various neurodegenerative diseases. Of course “further research” needed! 
But keep an ear out for this stuff in the next decade.
Problem of course will include arrow of causality. @puzzlegal had, another thread maybe, noted that it could be that a strong preference for strongly sweet may be a marker of a brain system that will be at future risk of neurodegenerative diseases. And maybe it will turn out that some people have variants of these receptors that both result in more sweet intake and result in neurodegenerative disease risk. I’m leaning the other way - that chronic high stimulation of these receptors leads to the disease states. But it could be either. Or both.
In any case I am happy to be someone who doesn’t love sweet things so much!
And will be looking to see if anything pans out from this stuff in the next decade or so.
Another interesting study to throw in the mix. Would be consistent with the story of receptor variations causing both. Plausibility anyway. Not convinced though.
https://www.jbc.org/article/S0021-9258(20)37019-8/fulltext
“To assess the importance of the sweet-taste receptors in the brain, we conducted transcriptomic and proteomic analyses of cortical and hippocampal tissues isolated from T1R3 knock-out (T1R3KO) mice. The effect of an impaired sweet-taste perception system on cognition functions were examined by analyzing synaptic integrity and performing animal behavior on T1R3KO mice. Although T1R3KO mice did not present a metabolically disrupted phenotype, bioinformatic interpretation of the high-dimensionality data indicated a strong neurodegenerative signature associated with significant alterations in pathways involved in neuritogenesis, dendritic growth, and synaptogenesis. Furthermore, a significantly reduced dendritic spine density was observed in T1R3KO mice together with alterations in learning and memory functions as well as sociability deficits. Taken together our data suggest that the sweet-taste receptor system plays an important neurotrophic role in the extralingual central nervous tissue that underpins synaptic function, memory acquisition, and social behavior.”
That’s hugely interesting. I will watch for that, too. And maybe cut back on how often i eat sweets. I have something sweet (an apple, a small chocolate candy) most days, and occasionally binge on sweets. (Not too often, as then I feel sick. But i do love me some sweettarts.)
Yup, also interesting.
And fwiw, while i suggested that causation might go the other way, i think it’s reasonably likely that eating too many sweets leads to problems. It’s naps (which are also correlated with dementia) where I’m willing to bet the causation is the other way. I suspect that a very early symptom of declining brain function is feeling mentally tired part way through the day.
More to just go hmm about is the frequency of sugar cravings as an early symptom in some forms of dementia, especially frontotemporal. Now lots of neural networks malfunctioning there so unlikely so simple as to blame these receptors… but still. Hmm.
https://agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1532-5415.1990.tb04423.x
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2484444
Thanks for that blurb on Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, which rightly or wrongly is my soft drink of choice, though I probably average about one 300 ml bottle (slightly smaller than a standard 355 ml can) every two days or so. FTR, it also contains acesulfame potassium in addition to aspartame in the US and Canadian markets. Not sure about the acesulfame but the aspartame amount is so far below the maximum daily intake value that I’d consider it silly to worry about health risks.
To my taste, they’ve done a terrific job of mimicking standard Coke sweetened with sugar, which is more than other beverage makers seem capable of. For example, I’ve never had artificially sweetened iced tea that I’ve particularly liked. Since I get a major dose of sugar drinking iced tea, it’s a good thing I don’t get even more from Coke!
I love a nice strong unsweetened ice tea. I can get seriously too much caffeine if a restaurant serves a good iced tea.
I just want to say, i am enjoying and learning from this discussion. My ignorance is cracking slightly.