How to Gain Weight on Diet Soda
Erythritol, the too-good-to-be-true nontoxic, low-calorie, tooth friendly sweetener that I profiled in my last blog post “Is There a Safe, Low-Calorie Sweetener?” may even act as an antioxidant. So what’s the catch?
Well, there are three ways that all low-caloric sweeteners could theoretically be harmful independent of their specific chemistry. As I report in my 2-min. video How Diet Soda Could Make Us Gain Weight, several large studies have found an association between artificial sweetener use and weight gain, meaning the people that drank the most diet soda, for example, gained the most weight. The most common explanation for this counterintuitive finding is what’s called reverse causation. People aren’t fat because they drink diet soda; they drink diet soda because they’re fat!
But there are at least three less benign alternative explanations. The first is called “overcompensation for expected caloric reduction.” If you covertly switch someone’s soda for diet soda without him or her knowing it, his or her caloric intake drops. Obviously, right? They’re not drinking all that sugar anymore. But what if you tell them what you did? People who knowingly are consuming artificial sweeteners may actually end up eating more calories. Why? Because they’re like hey, I’m drinking diet soda, so I can have two pieces of cake.
One of the studies I profile involved giving people an artificially sweetened cereal for breakfast, but only half were told. When it came to lunchtime, the group that knew they had eaten an artificially sweetened cereal ate significantly more than those that didn’t know any different. Basically, it’s the diet-soda-with-a-fast-food-meal syndrome. One may only lose weight on diet soda if you don’t realize it’s calorie-free.
The second reason even the most harmless noncaloric sweetener could still be harmful if we’re not careful has to do with how our brain is wired. Watch my 2-min. video Neurobiology of Artificial Sweeteners to learn how the disconnect between sweetness sensations coming from our tongue and the lack of a caloric feedback loop in the gut may result in overeating.
Finally, all sweeteners–natural and artificial, caloric and non-caloric—help maintain cravings for intensely sweet foods. As I explain in my 2-min. video Unsweetening the Diet, if you go on a low salt diet, for the first few weeks everything tastes like cardboard until your taste buds have a chance to adapt to the new norm. After that, natural low sodium foods taste perfectly fine and adding table salt tastes gross because it’s way too salty. Same thing with the sweeteners.
At home maybe you use a harmless sweetener like erythritol—that’s great, but then what if you go on vacation and forget it at home? You still take your preference for severely sweet food with you and that may end up translating into the increased consumption of less than healthy foods.
So those are the caveats for even nontoxic sweeteners. They are only safe if you don’t use them as an excuse to eat more junk food.
-Michael Greger, M.D.
PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.
Image credit: (vincent desjardins) / Flickr
Is There a Safe, Low-Calorie Sweetener?
The natural sweetener erythritol does not appear to carry the adverse effects associated with other low and non-caloric natural and artificial sweeteners and may actually have antioxidant potential. For a while it was only available in Japan but now it’s becoming more accessible. It’s found naturally in pears and grapes, but industrially we have yeast make it for us. It doesn’t cause cavities and hasn’t been implicated in some of the disorders tied to other sweeteners such as fibromyalgia (see my video Aspartame-Induced Fibromyalgia), preterm birth (Diet Soda and Preterm Birth), headaches, hypertension, brain disorders, and platelet disorders (see A Harmless Artificial Sweetener).
What about stevia? The jury is finally in. The reason it’s been such a long time coming is that research out of Japan in the ’90s found that steviosides, the active ingredient in stevia, appeared totally harmless, but in the guts of rats intestinal bacteria transformed steviosides into something called steviol, which is toxic, causing a big spike in mutagenic DNA damage (see the graph in Is Stevia Good For You?). So the question was do we have those same rat bacteria in our guts, and it turns out we do. So we now know that when we eat stevia, mutagenic compounds are produced in our colons and absorbed into our bloodstream. The only remaining question was how much.
In the World Health Organization’s evaluation of food additives, they consider up to 4 mg/kg of body weight safe. So that’s 1.8 mg per pound. If you multiply your ideal weight in pounds by 1.8, that’s about how many milligrams of stevia compounds you should stay under on an average daily basis. As long as one consumes less than, say, two stevia-sweetened beverages a day, stevia can be considered harmless. Erythritol may be even better than harmless, though, as you can see in my 2-min. video Erythritol May Be a Sweet Antioxidant.
There are two caloric sweeteners that are health-promoting—can you guess which ones? Check out The Healthiest Sweetener for a comparison of agave nectar, blackstrap molasses, brown rice syrup, corn syrup, brown sugar, date sugar, honey, maple syrup, raw cane sugar, and turbinado sugar.
-Michael Greger, M.D.
PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my 2012 year-in-review presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.
Image credit: Lisa Brewster / Flickr
