Lose Calories = Lose Weight?

By Dr. Eric Read

It’s a simple concept, if you take in less calories than you burn everyday, you will lose weight. It’s the basis for almost any weight loss program and overall it is very sound and tested advice.

But when it comes to the "diet" foods it isn’t really that simple. Many times in order to cut our calories many food manufacturers will use artificial sweeteners that contain zero calories. Common types are saccharine, aspertame, splenda, etc.

How great is it that 20oz of diet Coke will add zero calories to your "input" compared to a 20 oz regular Coke with its 17 tsp of sugar and 243 calories. It seems like a no brainer that anyone trying to lose weight would go for the diet Coke every time. But should they?

It has long been thought that these artificial sweeteners, although being calorie free, actually promote weight gain! How can that be? Well some new research out of Purdue University’s Ingestive Behavior Research Center is giving us some answers.

Their study involved two groups of rats. One group was fed a diet of yogurt sweetened with glucose (a simple sugar) and the other group was fed yogurt sweetened with saccharine ( a zero calorie artificial sweetener).

At the end of the study, the researchers had some pretty unexpected results. The group consuming the zero calorie artificial sweetener had actually:

Doesn’t that seem a bit backwards? When you look at it from strictly a calorie standpoint, it is backwards. When you look at it from a total body view it makes perfect sense. Let me explain.

Your body is a wonderful complex machine, with its own built in system of checks and balances. These systems control your blood pressure, the beating of your heart, your breathing. They also control the digestion of your food. Before you even swallow your food, digestive juices are being secreted in your digestive tract to turn your food into energy. It has feedback mechanisms that will make you hungry and tell you when you are full.

It is believed that using zero calorie sweeteners actually breaks the connection your brain and body have between sweet sensations and a high calorie food. This then changes your body’s ability to regulate its intake of food. This is a reason why they think the saccharine group ended up eating more calories overall, their bodies couldn’t regulate themselves.

Another change researchers noted was that of the core temperature. Usually that temperature rises after eating, but this didn’t happen in the group eating food sweetened with artificial sweetners. The group eating food sweetened with sugar had normal rises in temperature. Researchers believe this inhibited biological response ultimately led the rats to overeat and made it harder to burn the calories later. Definitely two things you don’t want to happen when trying to lose weight.

This particular study is very recent and can be found in "Behavioral Neuroscience Feb 2008, Vol. 122, No. 1, 161-173.

Previous studies done on artificial sweeteners have shown that:

Besides these effects on digestion and weight gain, these sweeteners break down into chemicals that have other adverse effects on the body. Aspertame breaks down into a substance that can distort the seretonin/dopamine balance in the brain causing depression or migraine headaches. It also breaks down into formaldehyde, which has its own set of toxicities associated with it.

So I guess you might be asking if drinking regular soda over diet is better? Many dieticians, nutritionists, and weight loss clinics have, and most likely will, continue to promote artificial sweeteners with zero calories as an aid to weight loss. From a strictly calorie point of view, they would be correct. Others are starting to look at the big picture and see that zero calories doesn’t always mean it’s beneficial to weight loss or your health.