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Fake
Sweeteners Boost Rats' Eating
Rats fed artificial sweeteners ate three
times the calories of rats given sugar, a finding the study's
authors said suggests sugar-free foods may play a role in the
nation's obesity epidemic.
Other scientists, however, dismissed
that conclusion, saying studies on people don't indicate that.
One researcher called the rat study nonsense.
The experiment by Purdue University
researchers appears in the July issue of the International Journal
of Obesity. The scientists said their rodent findings could help
explain why Americans have grown fatter over the past two decades
even as the nation's consumption of artificially sweetened sodas
and snack foods has soared.
They contend that artificial sweeteners
could be interfering with people's natural ability to regulate
how much they eat by distinguishing between high- and low- calorie
sweets.
As part of their study, they fed
two groups of rats sweet-flavored liquids for 10 days. One group
got only sugar-sweetened liquids, while the other was fed liquids
sweetened by both sugar and saccharin.
After the 10 days, both groups
of rats were given a sugary, chocolate-flavored snack and regular
rat chow.
Both groups of rats ate about the
same amount of the chocolate snack. But the rats fed both sugar
and saccharin ate three times the calories of the rat chow than
the rats fed only the sugar-sweetened drink.
Susan Swithers, an associate professor
of psychological sciences at Purdue, said the findings suggest
the rats given the saccharin-sweetened drink ate more rat chow
because they experienced an inconsistent relationship between
sweet taste and calories.
That, in turn, could confound their
natural ability to keep track of calories.
"Consuming artificially sweetened
products may interfere with one of the automatic processes our
bodies use to regulate calorie intake," said Swithers, the study's
co-author.
Adam Drewnowski, director of nutritional
sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said that
whatever caused the rats to overeat is unclear and could have
been caused by something other than the sugar-free liquid they
were fed. He said the rat results have no bearing on human research.
"They're extrapolating and saying
that humans may not be adjusting to the artificial sweeteners
because they're expecting calories and the calories are not coming
in. I just think this is nonsense," he said.
Drewnowski said a 1994 French study
he helped direct compared people given yogurt artificially sweetened
with aspartame with people who ate yogurt sweetened with sugar.
The study found no differences in eating behavior between the
two groups.
Terry Davidson, a Purdue professor
of psychological sciences, said the team's findings involving
saccharin cannot be extended to more commonly used artificial
sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose, sold as Splenda.
G. Harvey Anderson, a professor
of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto who was not
involved in the Purdue research, said its findings could be explained
by the fact that rats like the taste of saccharin.
He said the rats who overate could
have favored the saccharin-flavored drink and then compensated
for its lack of calories by eating more rat chow. "I just find
this data hard to interpret," Anderson said.
Reference
Source 102
July
8, 2004
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