Weight Gain and Sugar Substitutes
Posted on November 11, 2008
Filed Under Lose Weight | Leave a Comment
Okay, you need to lose weight and so you decide that you need to cut out sugar. No more sugar in your coffee, no more soft drinks containing sugar, no more ready meals with sugar on the label. You’re on a mission, and sugar has got to go! You start to examine every label you can find to try and eliminate all sugar from your diet. But is it the right thing to do?
Despite what you may think, refined sugar is not a food, it’s a chemical. It’s extracted from plants, which contain no fiber, no minerals, no proteins, no fats and no enzymes. It is made up of empty calories.
When you eat sugar, you put your body in a bit of a dilemma. In order to metabolize the sugar it has to borrow nutrients from other cells. When your brain gets the message that its reserves are being depleted, it sends out hunger signals. Your reaction is to come to its rescue – usually with some high-calorie food. The result is weight gain.
It would appear that stopping eating sugar is no bad thing. But here’s the question. Are you just going to give it up or are you going to look for a sugar substitute like aspartame or saccharin? If you are, then you should think again.
One thing that has been puzzling scientists is that despite the growth in the consumption of sugar substitutes, there has been no reduction in levels of obesity, in fact the situation has become considerably worse.
Recent studies have found that far from helping you to lose weight, artificial sweeteners actually help you to put on weight!
Experiments were carried out with animals where over time, some were fed food containing natural sweeteners and others food containing artificial sweeteners. What was discovered was that our bodies associate sweetness with food full of calories. In the case of the animals who were fed artificial sweeteners their bodies were not fooled by the artificial sweeteners! To make up for the lack of sweet calories they continued to eat to try and make up the shortfall – the result was weight gain.
You can’t fool your body! The interesting thing about this experiment is that it could have highlighted one of the main reasons why we continue to put on weight despite eliminating sugar from our diet. Clearly to replace sugar with artificial sweeteners makes things a whole lot worse!
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