Splenda Contributes to Weight Gain
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This article was taken from consumeraffair.com
A new Duke University study finds that the artificial sweetener Splenda contributes to obesity, destroys beneficial intestinal bacteria and may interfere with absorption of prescription drugs.
It's the latest in a continuing round of studies, claims and counter-claims pitting artificial sweeteners against the powerful Sugar Association, the lobbying group for the sugar industry, which financed the Duke study.
McNeil Nutritionals, which manufactures Splenda, said the study's findings were "unsupported by the data presented" and said Splenda may be safely used "as part of a healthy diet." The study is scheduled to be published in a forthcoming issue of The Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health. An advance copy appears on its Web site.
A Minneapolis-based group called Citizens for Health said the Duke study demonstrates that Splenda is a health threat. The group, headed by attorney Jim Turner, has been collecting consumer reports of side effects supposedly caused by Splenda.
"The report makes it clear that the artificial sweetener Splenda and its key component sucralose pose a threat to the people who consume the product. Hundreds of consumers have complained to us about side effects from using Splenda and this study ... confirms that the chemicals in the little yellow package should carry a big red warning label," said Turner.
Turner's group has filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) calling on it to review its approval of sucralose and to require a warning label on Splenda packaging cautioning that people who take medications or gave gastrointestinal problems avoid using Splenda.
"The new study makes it clear that Splenda can cause you to gain weight and lose the benefits of medications designed to improve and protect your health. The FDA should not continue to turn a blind eye to this health threat," Turner said.
In February, a study published in Behavioral Neuroscience cites laboratory evidence that the widespread use of nocalorie sweeteners may actually make it harder for people to control their intake and body weight.
McNeil and the Sugar Association have been waging war in the courts and the public arena for years. In 2004, the association sued McNeil, claiming it had misled consumers by claiming that Splenda was "made like sugar, so it tastes like sugar."
Splenda's main ingredient -- sucralose -- is manufactured. The process involves the use of a sugar molecule but there is no sugar in the finished product.
The Duke study was
conducted on rats over a
12-week period. A lead
researcher, Dr. Mohamed B.
Abou-Donia, said the Sugar
Association had no input
into the study's findings.
In the February study,
psychologists at Purdue
University's Ingestive
Behavior Research Center
reported that compared with
rats that ate yogurt
sweetened with sugar,
those given yogurt
sweetened with zero-calorie
saccharin later consumed
more calories, gained more
weight, put on more body
fat, and didn't make up for it
by cutting back later.
Authors Susan Swithers,
PhD, and Terry Davidson,
PhD, theorize that by
breaking the connection
between a sweet sensation
and high-calorie food, the
use of saccharin changes
the body's ability to regulate
intake. That change
depends on experience.
Problems with selfregulation
might explain in
part why obesity has risen
in parallel with the use of
artificial sweeteners. It also
might explain why, says
Swithers, scientific
consensus on human use of
artificial sweeteners is
inconclusive, with various
studies finding evidence of
weight loss, weight gain or
little effect.
Because people may have different experiences with artificial and natural sweeteners, human studies that don't take into account prior consumption may produce a variety of outcomes.
Three different experiments
explored whether saccharin
changed lab animals' ability
to regulate their intake,
using different assessments
-- the most obvious being
caloric intake, weight gain,
and compensating by
cutting back.
The experimenters also
measured changes in core
body temperature, a
physiological assessment.
Normally when we prepare
to eat, the metabolic engine
revs up. However, rats that
had been trained to respond
using saccharin (which
broke the link between
sweetness and calories),
relative to rats trained on
glucose, showed a smaller
rise in core body temperate
after eating a novel, sweettasting,
high-calorie meal.
The authors think this
blunted response both led
to overeating and made it
harder to burn off sweettasting
calories.
"The data clearly indicate
that consuming a food
sweetened with no-calorie
saccharin can lead to
greater body-weight gain
and adiposity (fat) than
would consuming the same
food sweetened with a
higher-calorie sugar," the
authors wrote.
The authors acknowledge
that this outcome may seem
counterintuitive and might
not come as welcome news
to human clinical
researchers and health-care
practitioners, who have long
recommended low- or nocalorie
sweeteners. What's
more, the data come from
rats, not humans.
However, they noted that
their findings match
emerging evidence that
people who drink more diet
drinks are at higher risk for
obesity and metabolic
syndrome, a collection of
medical problems such as
abdominal fat, high blood
pressure and insulin
resistance that put people
at risk for heart disease and
diabetes.
Why would a sugar
substitute backfire?
Swithers and Davidson
wrote that sweet foods
provide a "salient
orosensory stimulus" that
strongly predicts
someone is about to take
in a lot of calories.
Ingestive and digestive
reflexes gear up for that
intake but when false sweetness isn't followed
by lots of calories, the
system gets confused.
Thus, people may eat
more or expend less
energy than they
otherwise would.
The good news,
Swithers says, is that
people can still count
calories to regulate
intake and body weight.
However, she
sympathizes with the
dieter's lament that
counting calories
requires more conscious
effort than consuming
low-calorie foods.
Swithers adds that
based on the lab's
hypothesis, other
artificial sweeteners such
as aspartame, sucralose
and acesulfame K, which
also taste sweet but do
not predict the delivery of
calories, could have
similar effects.
Finally, although the
results are consistent
with the idea that
humans would show
similar effects, human
Susan E.; Davidson, Terry L. Behavioral Neuroscience. Vol 122(1), Feb 2008, 161-173.
Animals may use sweet taste to predict the caloric contents of food. Eating sweet noncaloric substances may degrade this predictive relationship, leading to positive energy balance through increased food intake and/or diminished energy expenditure. These experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that experiences that reduce the validity of sweet taste as a predictor of the caloric or nutritive consequences of eating may contribute to deficits in the regulation of energy by reducing the ability of sweet-tasting foods that contain calories to evoke physiological responses that underlie tight regulation. Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were given differential experience with a sweet taste that either predicted increased caloric content (glucose) or did not predict increased calories (saccharin). We found that reducing the correlation between sweet taste and the caloric content of foods using artificial sweeteners in rats resulted in increased caloric intake, increased body weight, and increased adiposity, as well as diminished caloric compensation and blunted thermic responses to sweettasting diets. These results suggest that consumption of products containing artificial sweeteners may lead to increased body weight and obesity by interfering with fundamental homeostatic, physiological processes.