I recall reading somewhere the hypothesis that artificial sweeteners caused weight gain by prompting a mismatch between what the brain tasted as sweet and what actually happens to blood sugar levels. The brain feels as though the blood sugar didn’t raise enough based on how much sweetness was tasted, and assumes that future food will have the same sort of effect, leaving people wanting to eat more than if they had drank real sugar.
It seems like it might make sense, but suggests a higher level subconscious thought than we’d all like to think happens in our brains.
Some people cannot detox aspartame well, differences in epigenetic traits that create an enzyme or series of enzymes that break it down can lead to an assortment of problems if consumed for a long term. These gensets can reduce the amount of certain enzymes in the phenylalanine cycle. This isn’t about weight gain, but it can lead to weight gain when it causes symptoms that cause pain while moving around. One of the problems is sort of like fibromyalgia, but it is not true fibromyalgia. I never researched the weight gain part, but it probably can because if you cannot detox it it will cause inflammation and inflammation can cause a person to store fat.
Because I know about the phenylalanine thing, but if you’re body can’t break down phenylalanine then you’d know about it, as there are lots of foods that would make you ill. (and if someone were somehow mildly unable to break it down, and that caused bloating, then there’d be lots of foods that would cause much more severe effects than drinking a diet soda).
Chickens are fed antibiotics as growth enhancers. I understand that this works by altering the chicken equivalent of gut biome. If this can be done with artificial sweeteners, that would be a good thing.