Artificial sweeteners may screw with your appetite

Think a switch to diet drinks will help cut pounds? Possibly not.

Scientists found that rats consuming artificial sweeteners actually ate more than other rats and gained more weight. The hypothesis is that the body controls appetite by learning to match food flavor and sweetness to fullness. When the body gets sweetness but not as many calories, it may get fooled into thinking that sweetness doesn't provide fullness and cause the body to eat more to compensate.

Caveats:

• The research was in rats, not humans
• The rats had never encountered artificial sweeteners before. Most humans have.

Maybe this finding will eventually play out in humans as well, reminding us that there's no such things as a (calorie) free lunch.

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Stick with mom, not pop

Can Americans really find yet another way to be less healthy?

A new report shows that more and more Americans are flaunting Mom's advice and having pop with breakfast. Here's the numbers on pop drinkers:

• 1 in 7 people who eat breakfast outside the home
• 1 in 42 people who eat breakfast at home
  

This rising interest in breakfast pop comes at the expense of coffee, which probably means folks are turning to sugared pop as their preferred caffeine delivery vehicle. The article notes that most of these pop drinkers are not going with diet pop, so it's not even a compromise on caffeine v. sugar.

The sad part is that breakfast pop drinkers are probably part of the population drinking multiple cans Big Gulps each day, increasing their risk of broken bones, osteoporosis and other bone diseases. Speaking of Big Gulps, here's a nice illustration of why pop consumption has doubled since 1973: