WHO advises not to use non-sugar sweeteners for weight control
who.int
who.int
The only times I’ve been truly successful with weight loss is when I’ve weaned myself off any processed form of sugar. It’s hell for about 2 weeks, but at some point my cravings for processed foods and sweets drops like crazy and I’m then satisfied (mostly) with healthy, whole foods.
I stopped eating sugary foods over a year ago now. My definition is kind of loose, but basically if you'd call it a dessert I don't eat it.
Whole milk is the biggest exception. I also don't really care too much about sugar in stuff like ketchup or other sauces.
But soda, cake, sweets, donuts, basically anything for which the entire point is to be sweet and sugary, I just don't see the point. I would get horrendously addicted to it, but now it's just like - why? It does nothing for me. It even fucks up my teeth. Give me a chicken breast instead. Nom nom nom.
Given that, I think this isn't quite as strong of a suggestion as the title would imply at a glance. When I read the title, I thought "what? did we find out that NSS's are metabolizable or that they somehow offset something and cause other calories to be absorbed more readily?"
But no, this is just saying that, it turns out just switching to diet coke alone isn't enough to make you lose weight, and in aggregate it's not even a big enough dent to turn up in the statistics.
They say as much in the last paragraph: "Because the link observed in the evidence between NSS and disease outcomes might be confounded by baseline characteristics of study participants and complicated patterns of NSS use, the recommendation has been assessed as conditional, following WHO processes for developing guidelines. This signals that policy decisions based on this recommendation may require substantive discussion in specific country contexts, linked for example to the extent of consumption in different age groups."
"may require substantive discussion in specific country contexts" imo translates to "those facebook posts of morbidly obese people eating 3000 calories in one sitting but their otherwise-200-calorie soda can is instead 0-calorie-NSS".
I am a bit surprised it doesn't even make a dent in it though. But maybe it does have a psychological "offset" - people prone to overweightness will on average think "well my soda is 0-calorie so I can have this extra thing".
Overall, a bit of a non-statement from the WHO I think. I was hoping we'd learned more about the effects of non-metabolizable sugars on the gut biome or something similar.
I don't think I know anyone who drinks soda regularly outside of parties / nights out and is in shape.
You can use sweeteners in place of sugar to reduce total calories consumed.
There's not much more to it. People overthink this stuff way too much. There is no magic "eat this not that".
The reality is that most people just need to eat slightly less forever, or do slightly more exercise forever, tracking it if necessary.
But a teaspoon of sugar is approx 20 calories. It's a rounding error in most people's calorie intake.
There's a growing body of research showing that artificial sweeteners may actually cause weight gain because they trick our body to expect a bunch of calories that aren't coming; which ends up making us hungrier faster.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210928/Artificial-sweete...
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Diet/story?id=4792065&page...
Artificial sweeteners aren't just not going to melt fat; they may actually act as a fat magnet through a spiralling action: they provide an illusion that food is "not fattening", diminishing one's apparent need for self control; and then they cause hunger pangs. The terminus of this spiral is type-2 diabetes.
Problem is of course correlation isn't causation. We don't yet understand the action mechanism. Essentially the WHO's recommendation can be boiled down to "Overweight people sure drink a lot of diet soda, but they don't seem to be thin. Maybe it isn't helping?"
Well, maybe it isn't. Maybe it has no effect either way. Maybe it helps cut down calorie intake versus sugar, but increases cravings elsewhere. Maybe it tricks the body into thinking you ate something sweet, releasing insulin unnecessarily, and thus causing insulin resistance (that's my guess). Or maybe someone correlated data and drew completely incorrect conclusions based on their own bias. We don't yet know.
That said as of right now, it does seem prudent to eliminate or at least cut down on artificial sweeteners. But I could have said the same thing 20 years ago about avoiding eggs to drop your cholesterol, and that would have been wrong. Insert shrug emoji here.
It would be odd to say that "preparing gym bag the night before" leads to muscle growth. It's correlated sure, it's a good willpower/discipline hack, but the actual thing that caused the muscle growth was the workout (and rest and diet etc.)
edit: ah I see now. Yes, I agree that zero calorie food is probably bad news. I was thinking more along the lines of e.g. protein shakes with sweeteners, cake with a bit less sugar in it etc.
Soda is obviously bad IMO.
Tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer; smoking it does. Last century, we had to crack down on tobacco companies selling cigarettes as a healthy choice. It has become clear that artificial sweeteners do not live up to the medical claims that they have been sold under; they're possibly a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. Your "personal responsibility" schtick sounds great in a vacuum, but people are susceptible to marketing campaigns bombarding them with a counter-message: you don't need self control, just eat our magical non-fattening food!
I agree with everything except for this in the context of this article.
A can of coke is about 8 teaspoons, which is closer to 150 calories. That number is higher for other sodas like Mountain Dew or larger bottle of soda.
Depending on your habits this may be a rounding error in a given week/month or a significant part of your calorie consumption.
I don't really think of soda as being a serious component of someone's diet. I mean, it's totally optional, just drink water lol.
The main issue with sweeteners it seems is that people use them to justify eating/drinking non-foods. I wonder if the same effect comes up when people have like, roast chicken with a sweetened sauce rather than honey or equivalent.
It's the same thing with beer, which is roughly the same calorie count as a soda of equivalent size. Folks switching from a 'regular' beer to light beer or (even better) liquor can easily drop weight due to the difference in calories between the two.
A pound of fat is ~3500 calories, so gaining 1 pound only requires you to eat (or, rather drink) ~24 sodas or beers over your maintenance rate of energy consumption.
When I mean that it's not a serious component of someone's diet, I don't mean that it's not significant.
I mean that if you're drinking soda anything more than occasionally, you're probably not actually trying to lose weight, you're just enjoying life.
Although, I will say that many MANY people have extremely poor education in terms of dieting... so there may not be the knowledge there.
You might be able to get away with drinking a ton of Coke if you're bulking and lifting in the gym or you're an avid cyclist, but for your average office jockey trying to get 2000-2500 calories in, if you get 500+ from soda you're really limiting what you can eat to meet your protein, fat, micronutrient needs.
Do they cause cravings and would switching to something else (water, etc) be better? Oh I'm sure. I'm not aiming for perfect. I've been able to combine keeping drinks diet (soda, flavored water, completely unsweetened sparkling water) + other calorie restriction to lose weight.
I still struggle off and on personally with weight loss in general but that's more because of psychological struggles than anything else. But keeping some things I enjoy but having less of them or less caloric versions of them has been far more sustainable than any other weight-loss lifestyle I've tried- one that's easier to bounce back to when I do struggle
https://www.newhallhospital.co.uk/news/is-sugar-more-addicti...
What diet soda doesn't do, though, is provide any satiety benefit. Although regular soda provides very little satiety, I suspect it provides some small satiety, since it is still calories. If people don't get their 'cravings' in check, then you get overeating in other places, likely with other low satiety foods/drinks. In the end, it might be mostly a net neutral behavior if the other foods replacing the calories in soda are just as bad. This is mostly speculation, though.
At the end of the day, dieting is hard work, so if you get to a weight that needs to be corrected, the fix is not easy...
Sadly, many products marketed as having "stevia sweetener" often contain other ingredients which are bad for you, especially sugar alcohols. It's actually quite difficult to find good brands for products made with stevia-based sweeteners. There are only two brands I know of which I trust.