How Food Choices Shape Memory, Cognition & Cravings | Dr. Scott Kanoski

Artificial sweeteners and low-calorie sweeteners are a really big topic online.

There's some in my Yerba-

I believe I have some as well, yeah

...

Ste- Stevia, right? So it'd be a low-calorie, quote-unquote, "natural sweetener," although there's some manufacturing to take it from a plant to, like, a, a drink or a food.

But, uh, different than, like, sucralose, et cetera-

Yeah

... um, of course.

There seems to be three camps.

One is the camp that believes that these things are terrible, that they alter blood glucose, they mess up the microbiome, and that they, um, maybe even cause brain cancer.

I mean, that-

[laughs]

... people have made that argument about aspartame.

Um, I'm not in that camp, but you, you will see people arguing this.

The second group seems to be the ones that just say, "Look, this is not...

It's a non-issue, that these are inert in reasonable quantities of consumption." And then there's the third group, which I think is, uh, quite a few people, that kinda wonder, like, "Well, it's," quote-unquote, "human-made," and, like, "maybe this stuff isn't good."

Yeah.

W- what is the evidence, the, the research on consumption of, let's lump them for right now, low-calorie, artificial sweeteners on development of appetite, development of the brain, development of the system that you work on, and what does it tell us?

This is a very controversial topic.

Good.

And I don't think we have definitive answers in any of-- to support any of those three camps.

So when we consume sweet taste, we have what's called a...

There's a cephalic phase response, where we're releasing insulin before the nutrients actually get through the GI tract, just from the, the simple taste of sugar in the mouth.

Uh, so this is part of our metabolism, right? If you-- If this was a sugary drink, uh, you take a sip, you would have some insulin being released to kind of prepare the body, prepare the physiology for that perturbation in blood glucose levels.

And there is some evidence in preclinical animal models that if you disrupt the relationship between sweet taste in the mouth and the caloric consequences of consuming something, that you can have perturbations in, in appetite, uh, in, in glucose regulation.