Sweeteners & Your Appetite

Sugar is famously not great for the health. See for example: Is Sugar The New Smoking? ← the answer is “no, but it’s still very bad, just not in the same league of badness as smoking”!

Of course, there are some important circumstantial things to bear in mind, such as:

From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?

But even without sugar, simply sweetness itself can cause problems: we can build tolerance to sweetness. Many sugar substitutes are many times (in some cases, hundreds of times) sweeter than sugar. This leads to people craving increasingly sweeter foods for the same experiential sweetness level.

Because of this, the World Health Organization has released a report offering guidance regards the use of sugar-free sweeteners.

In a nutshell, the guidance is: don’t

• Here’s the report itself: Use of non-sugar sweeteners: WHO guideline
• And it was based on this huge systematic review: Health effects of the use of non-sugar sweeteners: a systematic review and meta-analysis
• Here’s the WHO’s own press release about it: WHO advises not to use non-sugar sweeteners for weight control in newly released guideline

Nevertheless, if you really want to, we previously did a rundown on:

• Sucrose (metabolic problems)
• Sucralose (genotoxic)
• Erythritol (ischemiagenic)
• Xylitol (gut disruptor)
• Acesulfame K (gut disruptor)
• Stevia (strong risk of sweetness tolerance problem)
• Glycine (beneficial in moderation, sweetness problem though)

For more details than those one-or-few-word summaries, see: What’s The Healthiest Sweetener?

We’ve also talked about: The Fascinating Truth About Aspartame, Cancer, & Neurotoxicity

…which covers how the most popular beliefs about aspartame are myths, and in large part stemming from a single viral hoax chain letter in the 90s!

But sweeteners really increase your appetite?

That’s the question that Dr. Sabina Anderson et al. put to the test all so recently, using a mixture of acesulfame K and acesulfame cyclamate (Ace-K/Cyc).

What they found, in few words:

• No, there was no increase in food intake: participants didn’t eat more after consuming artificial sweeteners compared with water, even when allowed to eat freely later.
• No, there was no meaningful effect on hunger overall: hunger, fullness, and satiety were the same between sweeteners and water across all time points during the study.
• In fact, the participants enjoyed reduced sweet cravings: the sweetened drink lowered the desire to eat something sweet, and this effect persisted even after adjusting for taste differences.

You may be thinking: what happened to that up top about tolerance spiralling and craving more and more sweet things?!

And the answer is: that’s in the big picture; this was a 265-minute study, done three times in a row. So, it’s less about what it does in the long term, and more about what it does in the moment.

Specifically,

❝Subjective appetite sensations were measured using visual analogue scales while fasting and nine times during a 250-min postprandial period. During this period, a standardized breakfast (0–10 min) was served and, 2 h later, a test drink containing either Ace-K/Cyc or water (120–130 min) was given. After 265 min, an ad libitum test meal was served.❞

Read in full: Acute and Prolonged Effects of Sweeteners and Sweetness Enhancers on Postprandial Appetite Sensations, Palatability, and Ad Libitum Energy Intake in Humans: A SWEET Sub-Study (yes, they say “and prolonged”, but when they say “prolonged”, they’re referring to t=265 min, as opposed to immediately after drinking the drink)

That does mean, of course, that while helpful to know about in the moment, the results may not be extrapolated to the long term.

It’s also worth noting that the sample size was small (n=26), so in terms of strength of evidence it’s more of an indicative “jumping-off point” for future studies, rather than anything that should necessarily shape policy (including your personal policy) in the meantime.

One other important limitation is that obviously the results are for acesulfame-K and cyclamate, which means the results cannot necessarily be assumed to apply to all artificial sweeteners.

In fact, there is some science to the opposite for at least one sweetener, sucralose:

The Sweetener That Interferes With Hunger/Satiety Signals

Of course, sucralose is not technically a non-sugar sweetener, as it is chemically a sugar. But in practical terms, sucralose is a sugar in the same way that coffee is a fruit, i.e. it’s true, but for most purposes we can disregard that information as it’s not how we usually use those words in daily parlance.

Want to learn more?

This recommendation’s tangential to our main topic today, but it’ll be relevant for a lot of people who use sweeteners as a blood sugar control tool, so:

Stop Overeating During Low Blood Sugars With Diabetes – by Ginger Vieira

Take care!