A new well done study that followed 1454 participants over a 10 year span found that the use of low calorie artificial sweeteners is independently associated with heavier relative weight, larger waist and a higher prevalence and incidence of abdominal obesity.
The study suggests that although the sweeteners have less calories they may have a metabolic activity that is pro-obesogenic- especially for abdominal adiposity. This basically means that the sweeteners promote fat being deposited in the abdominal cavity and around organs.
There are also some studies that suggest that people who use low cal sweeteners throughout the day end up consuming more calories than if they didn’t use sweeteners.
I have never been a fan of artificial sweeteners and highly advise my clients not to use them and now this new study just reinforces my stance. Especially for people who want to lose weight, I like to remove all sweet tasting foods whether it be real or artificial as we want to destroy cravings for sugars. I have found the best way to do this is by totally removing them from the diet.
This can be difficult for a few days up to a couple of weeks for some people as they will go through sugar withdrawals, but once they past that it is smooth sailing. Also I’m trying to reset a person’s taste buds that are overactive from too much sugar. This is why when people start dieting it is so difficult because everything tastes like cardboard without all the added sugars. This passes as well and people are amazed at how sweet fruit is once you re introduce it into the diet, once the taste buds are re-set.
So my advice to you is that if you are using artificial sweeteners then to get yourself off of them asap. It might be difficult at first but I promise that will pass and it will get easy!
For all you keeners you can check out the study here:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167241
