5 ms·

> Diet soda, although technically not containing carbs, prompts a similar insulin response to drinking sugared soda Is there any scientific basis for this clai

by CPLX 10y ago

> Diet soda, although technically not containing carbs, prompts a similar insulin response to drinking sugared soda Is there any scientific basis for this claim?

aduitsis 10y ago
A 15-second google search reveals this: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/artificial-sweeteners-insulin/ http://www.marksdailyapple.com/artificial-sweeteners-insulin... Some interesting links to pubmed there. Seems that aspartame does not affect insulin fwiw.
- apathy 10y ago
  Mark has a bit of an agenda. He is not nearly as full of shit as many others (to include many in academia) but he nonetheless has a financial conflict of interest due to the way he makes a living. I'm not saying he is wrong, but I am saying that you must think critically in the presence of COI.
  - bjterry 10y ago
    Mark Sisson's intellectual rigor is certainly higher than the average blogspam but not as high as the best diet bloggers in the paleo or fitness communities (e.g. Stephan Guyenet, Alan Aragon). That said, his biases would tend to go against artificial sweeteners, rather than towards them. In that article he suggests that you shouldn't eat them, even though he thinks the evidence of their insulin response effects is weak at best. If your point was that you should take all of his advice with a grain of salt, I definitely agree, since he promotes many things which have at most a marginal effect.
GarrisonPrime 10y ago
I don't have references on hand, but I can tell you that US medical schools are teaching: Artificial sweeteners do not appear to promote as significant an insulin response as digestible sugars do, however they appear to stimulate gluconeogenesis and lipogensis in a similar manner. In other words, drinking diet soda may not by itself cause problems, but it will stimulate your body to absorb even more of the burger and fries you consumed with the soda (or whatever other metabolites you currently have circulating in your bloodstream). I'm on mobile now with limited connectivity. I'll try to edit later with a link to a source.
- nxc18 10y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. I was remembering what my doctor and some news articles told me a few years ago, both of which I'm sure gave dumbed down information. The end result seems to be what I expected, just not the underlying cause. Regardless, it was a huge wake up call to not just treat diet soda like it was basically water.
luketych 10y ago
I get annoyed when people stop a discussion dead in its tracks by asking for references like this, especially when they can easily look it up themselves if they actually cared about the answer rather than winning. If you think about it, any molecule that isn't sugar but tastes like sugar will have a similar molecular shape to sugar. Hmmmm I wonder if this will fit into receptors in other places in the body, not just on the tongue. Maybe it will affect gut bacteria. Maybe even trigger other events within our bodies. If we would stop and think with an open mind, many of these arguments would become discussions, and we wouldn't need to play the baby card by asking for proof. Remember how long it took to finally get enough proof in order to show others how wrong our mainstream religions are? And even with all the evidence we have accumulated, still people say, "show me the proof. I'm a reasonable man." Bullshit. Let's not fall into this trap again. Many of these questions can be answered without slow, hard science. We don't need to hit everything with the biggest hammer in our toolbox before we can move forward.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  I don't think "keeping an open mind" means accepting statements without evidence until they are debunked. Rather, it means that if evidence arises which contradicts your presuppositions, you must not ignore it. But this all assumes there is evidence available. Is there?
  - luketych 10y ago
    What I am trying to say is that if we close our minds right away then we will miss obvious answers. We will tend to overcomplicate things and reach for our most-expensive tools. I've read "scientific" articles that make use of the most cutting-edge statistical models in order to "prove" that something like "emotional intelligence does not correlate with success." Ok, poor example, and I made it up. But there are many research articles out there that look impressive because of all the tools they throw at the problem. Under the surface these studies are bunk.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
terhechte 10y ago
I also can't find the link right now, but there was a study recently which claimed that Stevia, in particular, did not cause an insulin response after consumption.
- apathy 10y ago
  The opposite, actually. http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/30/dc12-2221 http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/30/dc... Beware of small sample sizes in these sorts of studies. Until you get up into the hundreds or thousands, I personally would expect regression to the mean. Just FYI.
  - DrScump 10y ago
    No. that study used sucralose ("Splenda" et al) -- a completely unrelated, artificial sweetener. Stevia is a naturally occurring plant extract which has steviol glycosides, having 150x the sweetness of sucrose (according to Wikipedia).
    - apathy 10y ago
      I'd edit the original, but some sort of a time limit has passed and I can't. Maybe it's better for people to see that I can't keep the two straight. This is particularly sad since I used to put Splenda in my coffee (since stopped, it's either sugar or nothing for me now) and had a stevia plant on my porch that a neighbor gave me. I couldn't ever get past the "off" taste of stevia, no matter how many times I tried, so eventually I gave up on that too. Now I'm a little curious what happens to blood insulin when athletes fire down a stevia-flavored source of short chain carbohydrates prior to exercise vs. unflavored. When I have time I'll look it up. The nice thing about this (stevia vs. sugar or vs. artificial sweeteners) is that it lends itself naturally to a two factor design, "natural" vs. not and "real sugar" vs. not, orthogonally. Anyways, yes, I was wrong about that and will probably fuck it up again in the future, although at least now I'm aware of the problem.

by CPLX 10y ago

> Diet soda, although technically not containing carbs, prompts a similar insulin response to drinking sugared soda Is there any scientific basis for this claim?

aduitsis 10y ago

A 15-second google search reveals this: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/artificial-sweeteners-insulin/ http://www.marksdailyapple.com/artificial-sweeteners-insulin... Some interesting links to pubmed there. Seems that aspartame does not affect insulin fwiw.

apathy 10y ago
Mark has a bit of an agenda. He is not nearly as full of shit as many others (to include many in academia) but he nonetheless has a financial conflict of interest due to the way he makes a living. I'm not saying he is wrong, but I am saying that you must think critically in the presence of COI.
- bjterry 10y ago
  Mark Sisson's intellectual rigor is certainly higher than the average blogspam but not as high as the best diet bloggers in the paleo or fitness communities (e.g. Stephan Guyenet, Alan Aragon). That said, his biases would tend to go against artificial sweeteners, rather than towards them. In that article he suggests that you shouldn't eat them, even though he thinks the evidence of their insulin response effects is weak at best. If your point was that you should take all of his advice with a grain of salt, I definitely agree, since he promotes many things which have at most a marginal effect.

GarrisonPrime 10y ago

I don't have references on hand, but I can tell you that US medical schools are teaching: Artificial sweeteners do not appear to promote as significant an insulin response as digestible sugars do, however they appear to stimulate gluconeogenesis and lipogensis in a similar manner. In other words, drinking diet soda may not by itself cause problems, but it will stimulate your body to absorb even more of the burger and fries you consumed with the soda (or whatever other metabolites you currently have circulating in your bloodstream). I'm on mobile now with limited connectivity. I'll try to edit later with a link to a source.

nxc18 10y ago
Thanks for the clarification. I was remembering what my doctor and some news articles told me a few years ago, both of which I'm sure gave dumbed down information. The end result seems to be what I expected, just not the underlying cause. Regardless, it was a huge wake up call to not just treat diet soda like it was basically water.

luketych 10y ago

I get annoyed when people stop a discussion dead in its tracks by asking for references like this, especially when they can easily look it up themselves if they actually cared about the answer rather than winning. If you think about it, any molecule that isn't sugar but tastes like sugar will have a similar molecular shape to sugar. Hmmmm I wonder if this will fit into receptors in other places in the body, not just on the tongue. Maybe it will affect gut bacteria. Maybe even trigger other events within our bodies. If we would stop and think with an open mind, many of these arguments would become discussions, and we wouldn't need to play the baby card by asking for proof. Remember how long it took to finally get enough proof in order to show others how wrong our mainstream religions are? And even with all the evidence we have accumulated, still people say, "show me the proof. I'm a reasonable man." Bullshit. Let's not fall into this trap again. Many of these questions can be answered without slow, hard science. We don't need to hit everything with the biggest hammer in our toolbox before we can move forward.

jschwartzi 10y ago
I don't think "keeping an open mind" means accepting statements without evidence until they are debunked. Rather, it means that if evidence arises which contradicts your presuppositions, you must not ignore it. But this all assumes there is evidence available. Is there?
- luketych 10y ago
  What I am trying to say is that if we close our minds right away then we will miss obvious answers. We will tend to overcomplicate things and reach for our most-expensive tools. I've read "scientific" articles that make use of the most cutting-edge statistical models in order to "prove" that something like "emotional intelligence does not correlate with success." Ok, poor example, and I made it up. But there are many research articles out there that look impressive because of all the tools they throw at the problem. Under the surface these studies are bunk.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

terhechte 10y ago

I also can't find the link right now, but there was a study recently which claimed that Stevia, in particular, did not cause an insulin response after consumption.

apathy 10y ago
The opposite, actually. http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/30/dc12-2221 http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/30/dc... Beware of small sample sizes in these sorts of studies. Until you get up into the hundreds or thousands, I personally would expect regression to the mean. Just FYI.
- DrScump 10y ago
  No. that study used sucralose ("Splenda" et al) -- a completely unrelated, artificial sweetener. Stevia is a naturally occurring plant extract which has steviol glycosides, having 150x the sweetness of sucrose (according to Wikipedia).
  - apathy 10y ago
    I'd edit the original, but some sort of a time limit has passed and I can't. Maybe it's better for people to see that I can't keep the two straight. This is particularly sad since I used to put Splenda in my coffee (since stopped, it's either sugar or nothing for me now) and had a stevia plant on my porch that a neighbor gave me. I couldn't ever get past the "off" taste of stevia, no matter how many times I tried, so eventually I gave up on that too. Now I'm a little curious what happens to blood insulin when athletes fire down a stevia-flavored source of short chain carbohydrates prior to exercise vs. unflavored. When I have time I'll look it up. The nice thing about this (stevia vs. sugar or vs. artificial sweeteners) is that it lends itself naturally to a two factor design, "natural" vs. not and "real sugar" vs. not, orthogonally. Anyways, yes, I was wrong about that and will probably fuck it up again in the future, although at least now I'm aware of the problem.