Fatten up - drink Diet Sodas

Consuming low-calorie drinks may increase the risk of putting on weight, according to a new study.

The new research suggests that people who choose diet drinks containing artificial sweeteners tend to overcompensate and consume more calories than those who do not.

Although the rise in obesity has corresponded with a growth in low-calorie soft drinks, designed to make keeping weight down easy by replacing sugar with saccharine or other sweeteners, scientists who conducted experiments using rats at Purdue University in Indiana, have suggested that the opposite may be happening.

They found that rats fed on yogurt sweetened with saccharine ate more calories, gained more weight and put on more body fat than rats that were given yogurt sweetened with glucose.

Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson, who conducted the experiments, have suggested that by breaking the connection between a sweet sensation and high-calorie food, the use of saccharine changes the body’s ability to regulate how many calories it consumes.

“The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharine can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with a higher-calorie sugar,” they conclude in their report, which is published in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,330287,00.html

But we don't sweeten drinks with sugar anymore; it's high fructose corn syrup. Wonder how that affects obesity.........

SFCraig wrote:But we don't sweeten drinks with sugar anymore; it's high fructose corn syrup. Wonder how that affects obesity.........

I had to look that up, ..... but frutose (fruits, honey) and sucrose (corn/cane/beet sugar) have the same formuls, C6 H12 O6, ...but the frutose is much sweeter.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is any of a group of corn syrups which have undergone enzymatic processing in order to increase their fructose content and are then mixed with pure corn syrup (100% glucose) to reach their final form.