>but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not
They fuck up your microbiome and the insulin response. There is absolutely no reason to use them ever. Grow up and embrace the bitterness.
They fuck up your microbiome and the insulin response. There is absolutely no reason to use them ever. Grow up and embrace the bitterness.
Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
That’s not really the case when discussing school meals though, when kids will generally be eating what is put in front of them.
Subjectively, a few months of wearing a monitor appeared to show no perceptible effect on my own.
Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed.
For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.
What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency?
What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.
No, not at all.
Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer.
This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect.
> What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
When it comes to soft drinks and all-cause mortality, artificially sweetened is not better nor worse than sugar. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478
When it comes to weight, results are either neutral or inconclusive.
DALDERUP, L., VISSER, W. Effects of Sodium Cyclamate on the Growth of Rats compared with other Variations in the Diet. Nature 221, 91–92 (1969) https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0
But of course the manufacturers of feed additives also extensively studied which artificial sweetener compositions achieve body mass gain / feed efficiency increase for which group of animals. There is an extensive review e.g. on pigs here: