Thursday, January 19, 2012

Diet Rat Soda

On my acquisition of knowledge, I ran across some interesting information and studies. I believe that every family has their individual who participates in the daily or even more frequent run to McDonalds or Sonic for the Diet Coke run. There is also the individuals who carry around the monster large Big Gulps. I ran across some interesting studies based out of Purdue in the Davidson lab. Davidson and his collegues have put out several studies about the consumption of artificial sweeteners. I think there can be no doubt that in term of calorie consumption and therefore weight gain the sugared sodas are far and above the culprit over their artificial counterparts. Therefore you would expect that use of artificial sweeteners would lead to a decrease in weight, this is not always the case. Several studies suggest that the uncoupling of sweetness and energy actually lead an individual to seek out sweets and increased calorie consumption. This is precisely what was studied in the labs at Purdue. Using rats, they gave one group of rats an addition of artificial sweeteners in their diet and monitored consumption. The rats who received the artificial sweeteners had increased consumption and weight gain. Now I know we are to rats, therefore cannot make a direct correlation, but something to tink about before you grab that second diet soda.

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