There’s new research indicating that mixing carbs and artificial sweeteners can alter your sensitivity to sweet tastes, possibly impacting insulin sensitivity.
Understanding taste
Taste doesn’t just allow us to enjoy food and drinks, it plays a role in maintaining our health. When we taste something sweet, it allows our bodies to release insulin into the blood. This hormone, which helps regulate blood sugar, helps regulate metabolic functions. But when we’re tricked into thinking we’re eating something sweet when it’s actually an artificial sweetener, our body gets confused. A new study has found this to be especially true when we combine carbs and artificial sweeteners.
“When we set out to do this study, the question that was driving us was whether or not repeated consumption of an artificial sweetener would lead to a degrading of the predictive ability of sweet taste,” says Professor Dana Small, senior author of the new study paper published in Cell Metabolism. “This would be important because sweet-taste perception might lose the ability to regulate metabolic responses that prepare the body for metabolizing glucose or carbohydrates in general.”
Shocking results
For the study, the researchers split 45 healthy adults into two groups. Neither group made any changes to their diets other than consuming seven fruit-flavored beverages in the lab.
The control group was given a beverage that was sweetened with sucralose. It also had maltodextrin, a carb, which was only used to control the number of calories in the sugar without making the beverage sweetener. The test group had beverages sweetened with table sugar.
But researchers were shocked to find that their “control group” showed:
- altered brain responses to sweet tastes
- altered insulin sensitivity
- altered glucose metabolism
To verify their results, the team asked another group of volunteers to drink beverages with either sucralose OR maltodextrin (not mixed) for 7 days. The scientists found that neither the sweetener alone or the maltodextrin alone affected taste sensitivity or insulin sensitivity.
