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Comment by cheath | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean that Sparkling Water makes you fat?

In addition to testing rats, the study[1] compared five categories of drinks in humans: water, regular carbonated beverage (think soda), diet carbonated beverage (think diet soda), carbonated water and degassed regular carbonated beverage. They measured the release of ghrelin[2], the hormone which essentially tells your body you're hungry.

According to their results, both regular carbonated beverages, diet carbonated beverages and carbonated water resulted in noticeably increased amount of gherlin released (see [1] for the specifics).

So shortly put, it seems sparkling water makes you hungrier. That doesn't necessarily mean it will make you fat, giving in to the feeling of hunger is always up to you, but feeling more hungry sure as hell will make it likely that you will put on more weight.

[1] https://sci-hub.cc/10.1016/j.orcp.2017.02.001

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghrelin

As far as I can tell, the paper does not include carbonated water as one of the options. It says:

"All rats were provided with standard diet Teklad Global 18% protein (2018SC from Harlan Laboratories). Rats of each group were supplemented with different beverages: (i) tap water, (ii) regular degassed CB (DgCB), (iii) regular CB (RCB) and (iv) diet CB (DCB)"

Read page 6:

"To extrapolate the study on humans, ghrelin levels were measured in male subjects after drinking any of the aforementioned beverages, in addition to CW (no caloric content, no sugar)."

OK, so they didn't do the rat study where they only changed the carbonation (still vs carbonated water), but later it appears they did this for the human subjects and measured the hormone level. It would be interesting to see a study with only that one variable changed to see actual weight gain in animal and human populations.

Anecdotal, but I changed from carbonated soft drinks to carbonated water and noted a marked difference.

For this model, this hormone is only an indirect effect on weight (through hunger); however, there is also a direct effect that is pretty strong: you are no longer drinking a ton of sugar, which has a noticeable number of calories in and of itself. They aren't saying the weight gain is equivalent, only the hormone release.

Random thought: I'd be curious if results hold up after drinking sparking water regularly and the novelty of it wears off. Like is any of the effect due to an associations in your brain triggered by the carbonation.

I hope not.. that is my favorite drink. All the bubbles without any of the junk!

ditto. I live off of it.

Maybe migrate to diet water?

I used to drink sparkling water exclusively. When I stopped buying bottled water (to reduce unnecessary expenses), I do seem to recall a slightly easier time of avoiding weight gain. But this really means little, objectively speaking; it's just anecdata.

Makes you more hungry. Wether that turns into fat is up to you, but it certainly make it easier to get fat.

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