Most of us consume at least some amount of artificial sweetners. These chemicals are generally sweeter than sugar and are not digested nor absorbed by our intestines, so we are spared the calories of sugar.
I heard this story last month on NPR about a surprising article that was published in the Oct 9th Nature, Artificial sweetners induce glucose interolerance by altering the gut microbiota. The NPR story was interesting, but the actual article is even better. In one article
The researchers were surprised to find both that artificial sweeteners significantly changed the gut microbiome of the mice they studied and that artificial sweeteners led to increased glucose intolerance. Furthermore, the effect on glucose intolerance was removed when they gave the mice cipro/flagyl formulations, which led them to the conclusion that the change in microbiome causes the change in glucose tolerance. To test this idea further, they performed fecal transplants from saccharin eating mice into normal diet mice, and again found impaired glucose tolerance in the fecal transplant recipients.
This sentence really sums it up:
"Here we demonstrate that consumption of commonly used NAS formulations drives the development of glucose intolerance through induction of compositional and functional alterations to the intestinal microbiota. These NAS-mediated deleterious metabolic effects are abrogated by antibiotic treatment, and are fully transferrable to germ-free mice upon faecal transplantation of microbiota configurations from NAS-consuming mice, or of microbiota anaerobically incubated in the presence of NAS."
This led me to want to know more about artificial sweeteners, so I found this article in Yale Journal of Biology and Meidicine: Gain weight by “going diet?” Artificial sweeteners and the neurobiology of sugar cravings. This review from 2010 looked at many epidemiological and experimental studies. It found frequent evidence that consuming artificial sweeteners, especially in soda, is associated with increased overall caloric intake.
"These studies pose a hypothesis: Inconsistent coupling between sweet taste and caloric content can lead to compensatory overeating and positive energy balance."
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