Not so sweet

image from here

The other night I flipped over to Food Additives: An Edible Adventure on SBS, a documentary hailing the wonders of food additives. Difficult though it was to hold myself back from screaming at the television (mental note: sell tv) I did watch the full episode and would be interested in seeing others in the series. Even though Stefan Gates did gloss over a huge amount of not so glowing evidence about food additives, he did touch on one very interesting piece of evidence about artificial sweeteners. The brain and body can tell the difference between artificial sweeteners and sugars.This is because although the artificial sweeteners bind to the same receptors on the tongue, they do not stimulate the same reward centers in the brain and sugar does. Also when artificial sweeteners are broken down by the body they do not release the same amount of energy as sugar does. The body is very smart, when we eat something sweet the brain expects there to be a sudden burst of energy, but alas, with artificial sweeteners there is none. So what does the body do? It must seek this energy from somewhere else and thus your body will make you more hungry so you will consume more food to get that extra energy it feels it has been deprived of. Add this to the detrimental health effects of artificial sweeteners and a case "for" artificial sweeteners seems a little thin. Mother nature 1, Scientist: 0.