[LifeStyle] Sugar Substitutes For Weight Loss: How Effective Are They?

[#Steeven.™]

What do studies and research say about the health effects of these products? They do have their advantages.

Artificial sweeteners promise to satisfy your sweet tooth without the downside of excess calories, and they're increasingly being used in a variety of products, ranging from diet sodas and powdered drink mixes to yogurt and baked goods. But it has long been anyone's guess whether using them can prevent weight gain (a problem many people are grappling with during this coronavirus lockdown).

There are already studies that offer some answers. Researchers have found that artificial sweeteners can be useful as a tool to help people break their sugar consumption habits; and that, for some people, replacing sugar with sweeteners without nutritional value can prevent weight gain. But they can also affect hormones, the level of sugar in the blood and other peculiarities of the metabolism that, according to some experts, are related, so they advise against its habitual consumption for prolonged periods.

"The idea that we must discard is that, since they do not have calories, they do not affect the metabolism either," said Marta Yanina Pepino, associate professor in the Department of Food Sciences and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Our data indicate that they have activity at the metabolic level and that, depending on the frequency with which they consume them, some people may be more affected than others."

The purchase of foods and beverages containing sugar substitutes has increased as health-conscious consumers cut back on their sugar intake. Diet drinks are the largest source of these sweeteners in the American diet. Among the most po[CENSORED]r sugar substitutes are sucralose, also known as Splenda, and aspartame, which is found in certain diet sodas and thousands of other foods. Stevia, a calorie-free plant extract that is marketed as a natural product, is also used abundantly in many products as a substitute for sugar.

For decades, there has been a heated debate about the effect artificial sweeteners have on health and body weight. Some of the initial concerns arose from animal research in the 1970s that concluded that artificial sweeteners could cause cancer. But subsequent studies in humans contradicted those claims and, in addition to other groups, the American Cancer Society, which evaluated the evidence in 2016, contends that there is no strong evidence of a link between low-calorie sweeteners and low-calorie sweeteners. cancer in humans.

 

What happens to your body weight when you consume sweeteners?
In a report recently published in The Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers at Children's Hospital Boston studied what happened when people who used to drink soda started drinking water or artificially sweetened beverages. The researchers recruited 203 adults who drank at least one sugary drink a day; only some of them were overweight.

The scientists divided them into three groups. The members of one group were given drinks with artificial sweeteners and asked to consume them instead of the soda they usually drank. Shipments of plain and carbonated water were sent to another group. A third group that served as controls continued to drink their sugary drinks as they used to.

After studying these groups for a year, the researchers found no overall differences in weight gain or other indicators of their metabolic health, such as changes in cholesterol or triglyceride levels. But the results were surprising when they specifically looked at the subjects who had a large accumulation of fat in the abdomen.

People who had more fat in the abdomen area - a major risk factor for metabolic diseases - had less significant weight gain when they switched from sugary drinks to diet drinks or water. In this group, those who drank diet drinks gained about a pound throughout the study, while those who drank water lost about a pound. But people with significant levels of abdominal fat who continued to consume sugary beverages gained an average of four and a half kilos.

"The effect is huge, very important," said David Ludwig, one of the study's authors and co-director of the New Balance Foundation Center for Obesity Prevention at Children's Hospital Boston.

Ludwig theorized that possibly people with a lot of belly fat would gain the most from substituting sugary drinks with diet drinks or water, since consuming sugar secretes more insulin, a hormone that stimulates fat storage. "Maybe a thin person is less sensitive to sugar," he commented.