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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related anecdote:

I went from always ordering a soft drink at restaurants to only drinking water. The swich occurred almost overnight, and I ended up losing about 25 lbs.

The reason I did this was entirely social, and it happened by accident. My parents didn't have soft drinks at home, except occasional leftovers after a party, so ordering a soft drink at a restaurant was sort of a "special treat," even if it was an infinitely refillable fountain drink. It turns out 3 glasses of soda have a metric fuckton of sugar.

Anyway, when I went to college, literally none of my friends would order soft drinks when we'd go out to eat. I'm not sure if it was because people were being thrifty, or for ease of splitting the bill, or maybe they just knew more about sugar than I did, but being the one person to order a soda felt so awkward that I just stopped and eventually never went back.

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I lost five pounds or so switching from Coke to Diet Coke.

There is more weight loss to be had switching from Diet Coke to water. It's obviously not the calorie content, but the insulin response from sweet tasting things that will occur even with artificial sweeteners.

Does that apply to all artificial sweeteners such as sucralose or is it specific to aspartame?

I have yet to find a single study confirming any rumored ill effects of artificial sweeteners, including aspartame. At least in any reasonable consumption amounts since you need so little of the sweetener.

People (probably those with controlling interests in sugar cane/beet industry) have been trying unsuccessfully to find/prove any sort of real deleterious effect from aspartame specifically, and lower-calory sweeteners in general for about 50 years now, so I think we can say they're fine.

I don't think there is scientific evidence to back that up from what I could find: https://www.oatext.com/Blood-glucose-and-insulin-response-to...

Thanks! While that is a very small study, it seems pretty convincing.

I haven't read that it affects insulin response. But I have heard that it can cause you to crave more calories because it gives you the perception of consuming something but without the calories. I'm not sure what the mechanism is here or if maybe it is just psychological.

Do you have a link to a reputable source? I've heard this a lot, and have a company in the nutrition space, but I haven't seen anything conclusive

I'm not sure about insulin resistance, but sweet-craving builds a tolerance kind of like spicy foods. That is, the more you eat sweet things, the more sweetness your body craves.

I've been using erythritol and stevia as sweeteners for years, and even with those, I find myself craving sweet things after consuming them more than when I go relatively long periods of time without eating sugary things or using sweetener.

The end result, at least for me, is that I crave sweet food more even when I use artificial sweeteners, making it harder to say no to eating shitty food later on.

Similar: one day in 2012 I quit soda cold turkey. It was supposed to be for 4 days as a challenge (I was drinking probably 2L+ a day of full-sugar cola / red bull at that point). I just didn't restart, and haven't had a glass of cola since. Now if I have a sip of Coca-cola it tastes so nasty I'll feel like spitting it out. Originally started drinking it because family didn't, so it was a way of showing my independence (and of doing what schoolmates could).

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