subject: Do Diet Sodas Really Cause Weight Gain? [print this page] Do Diet Sodas Really Cause Weight Gain? Do Diet Sodas Really Cause Weight Gain?
Despite what many popular web searches will reveal the link between diet sodas and weight gain is scant, and the authors of the research that did show a link recently made it known so.
The original research studies, a total of two of them that linked diet sodas with weight gain were done at Purdue University and both were performed in rats. The researchers that did the research said in a recent review areticle that "we were stunned at how the press jumped on our research," as they were both small studies and only observational in design, therefore no firm causation could be drawn from them.
Because of the large press attention to the research studies, the authors at Purdue Dr. John Popkin and Dr. Richard Mattes have published an exhaustive review of the subject in the journal Obesity.
While both researchers publicly acknowledge that they do not receive any funding from companies for their research, they found in their review that the notion that diet sodas cause obesity simply was not there, the science as a whole does not support it.
In the rat studies that the Purdue group had originally done, they tooka small number of rats and broke them into two groups. The first group received a sugary drink daily sweetened with sugar, while the second group received a similar sweet tasting beverage but that did not contain calories because it used an artificial non-calorie sweetener. This allowed for both groups to become accustomed to the sweet taste, but only one group actually attached that taste to additional calories.
After 10 days the rats were given a sweet high-calorie snack, the animals in both groups ate the same amount of the high-calorie sweet snack.
According to Dr. Mike Swithers, it was not so much of a conclusion that diet sodas cause weight gain, instead, that diet sodas themselves are not associated with eating less. In essence, says Dr. Swithers, drinking diet sodas will in itself not induce weight loss, but there is really no evidence that they cause weight gain.
The second research study done by the group used a similar study design but instead of using liquid calories, they used a solid food sweetened with either sugar or a non-calorie sweetener. The results were the same, using a non-calorie sweetener is not associated with lower calorie intake at mealtime.
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