Artificial Sweeteners Please Brain, but Don’t Satisfy

This is your brain on artificial sweeteners: confused, whirled in tangle. Why? Because part of your brain thinks it’s getting lots of something good, and another part of your brain thinks it’s not getting very much of something good. How that works is explained by research conducted at the University of California in San Diego, where scientists took MRI scan of brains of women sipping either water and sugar, or water and Splenda. The Scientific American reports that the researchers found that although both sugar and Splenda initiate the same taste and pleasure pathways in the brain, and
the subjects could not tell the solutions apart, the sugar activated
pleasure-related brain regions more extensively than the Splenda did. The study’s lead author, psychiatrist Guido Frank, suggests that when we taste Splenda, the reward system becomes activated but not satiated, and that exposure to an artificial sweetener may undermine the brain’s
ability to track calories and to determine when to stop eating.
Read more in The Scientific American.