As far as I am concerned, nothing makes much sense in life unless you view it through the lens of evolution.
This image appears frequently during the CCCN course.
So riddle me this, if you eat something sweet, the brain registers it and knows there are calories coming, and that it’s glucose, it will get insulin production going (to get the sugar into the cells).
So, what happens if you eat something sweet but with no calories, like an artificial sweetener, such as ASPARTAME or SUCRALOSE.
Well, the body wants to know where the calories are, and if they do not arrive, your body will demand more food and consumption goes up.
“After chronic exposure to a diet that contained the artificial sweetener sucralose, we saw that animals began eating a lot more,”
“Through systematic investigation of this effect, we found that inside the brain’s reward centres, sweet sensation is integrated with energy content. When sweetness versus energy is out of balance for a period of time, the brain recalibrates and increases total calories consumed.”
AKA when the sweetness and the actual energy/calories coming in are not aligned/out of balance, your body demands more calories and thus you eat more.
On top of that, independent of any actual sugars eaten, INSULIN also goes up (remember the body is detecting sweetness and expecting glucose, so it gets ready to put the glucose into the cell from the blood.
Thus, the great irony is, people wanting to avoid diabetes/stay healthy or diabetics who are trying to reduce their insulin and blood sugar levels, may actually be making it worse.
Long term rasied insulin levels, slowly make in INSULIN INSENSITIVE, aka DIABETIC.
But it gets worse, because insulin triggered by sweeteners can then trigger inflammation that then leads to, well, all bad stuff you do not want, but in this case, cardiovascular diease.
Hence they consulude.
There is so much more bad stuff that ASPARTAME does, but that would take literally days to go over.