A mistaken belief among many who choose “diet” foods is that they can then splurge on other high-calorie foods because the “diet” food makes up for the excess calories. This would explain the family of diners who all ordered diet sodas and then finished their meal with a round of cakes. They probably felt they “deserved” the treat because of the absence of calories in their drinks. This also is the mentality of many who go to gyms to run on a treadmill for 30min, only to waste it all (plus about 3 or 4 more trips to the gym on top of that) by rewarding themselves for their “hard work” by going to Dairy Queen afterwards.
Some also have the mentality of “well, if I’m eating all this junk anyway, why make it worse by drinking sugary soda?” So, they opt for the calorie-free diet soda in an attempt to minimize the “damage done” while piggin’ out.
Which is a perfectly valid reason to drink diet colas and then have cake, particularly if you’re going to be having refills of your drink. I don’t get the issue with having cake after drinking diet sodas. Would it have been better if they drank regular soda AND had cake? Of course not.
As for where I stand on the OP’s question, I say everything in moderation. I once got on a kick of probably 90%+ of my beverages being artificially sweetened, and after a while I’m pretty sure that it started causing me to develop almost acne-like hives. (cystic acne?) I swore off artificial sweeteners and the problem quickly went away.
Now the only non-caloric sweeteners I ingest with any regularity are stevia based. I make some pretty good lemonade out of Truvia and lemon juice, and it’s good in coffee, too. There are stevia-based sodas out there, but they are rare (WholeFoods sells Zevia.) I’ve heard that Coke and Pepsi will soon come out with their own stevia-based sodas, and when they do, those will be the only ones I drink on the rare occasions that I drink soda these days. There is some preliminary research that indicates that stevia may have a beneficial effect on blood sugar levels.
Or they ordered diet sodas because they hate the taste of regular sodas, not because they were counting calories. There are way too many variables in that single story to be able to draw the conclusion that they wanted cake because they drank diet soda.
Personally, I do get what he’s saying. He’s suggesting that some people will decide to indulge in cake because they’ve had that can of diet soda. In other words, they’re thinking, “I saved myself come calories because I drank Diet Coke instead of regular Coca-Cola. Oh, boy! This means that I can have some cake!”
This is admittedly speculation; however, it seems utterly plausible to me. I say this because of the times I’ve heard people say, “Oh, I’ll just go ahead and order this chocolate dessert. I’ll just have to work it off in the gym afterwards.” People seriously underestimate the amount of time and effort required to burn off a piece of chocolate cake. In the same way, I don’t doubt that most people overestimate the number of calories that they save by ordering a diet soda instead of a sugar-filled one.
No, he’s saying (or rather, his link is saying, and he didn’t do a good job of actually putting it into text in his post) that some studies have shown that eating/drinking artificial sweeteners actually causes lab animals to consume more calories than they otherwise would have, and there’s some fear that it may do the same in humans.
The hypothesis is that your body knows how much of a caloric load should come from something sweet. When it doesn’t get the calories but gets the sweet, it causes [something we don’t understand yet], which increases caloric intake over time.
Nothing to do with rationalization or ignorance, just biochemistry. Of course, we don’t know whether or not this is the case for humans, but it appears to be the case for lab rats. Unless it isn’t. Like many hypothesis, some studies support it and others don’t.
But the idea that humans aren’t “supposed to” crave sweets is ludicrous, of course. The mystery is whether artificial sweeteners make us crave them *more *than sugar does.
Like you said, it’s only a hypothesis at this point. Those (unscrupulous people) who have a vested interest (a Dr. Mercola comes to mind) in blurring the lines often conflate correlational data for causal data.
I’m thin, use artifical sweetners and do eat regular desserts. My thoughts on the subject: If I’m going to get sugar, I’m going to chew it.
I think the anti-artifical sweetner lobby has gotten too looney–claims that michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s and Heath Ledger’s death were really caused by their love of diet soda.
It’s an either/or situation–they both have good and bad points.
P&T did a BS episode on Fast Food. They are hardly experts but they addressed this part of the quote.
As with the expectations with the rats with a sweetener, if we are told something is fancy or home cooked, we think it’s better as long as it tasted as they expected. They made a soup out of ingredients from KFC and everyone thought it was good and not from a fast food place.
They also served a fast food place salad and when people were told it was fast food, they correctly guessed the calories. When told it was from a healthy choice, they underestimated calories by more than half. So, in this case, the healthy one was worse for anyone counting calories, if they don’t get the information, as they would think they are eating less than they were.
The conclusion at the end of the day was that it’s calories in has to be equal to calories out/used to sustain weight, or more out/used to lose weight. The source doesn’t matter, it’s all about what the person likes to eat.
Minor nitpick: they were told the salad came from a non-fast-food restaurant. Actually calling it a “healthy” restaurant would naturally have changed the estimates, but the key was whether merely perceiving it as fast food would make people rate it higher.