"The learned responses get blunted or go away," explained Swithers.
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"No one is saying cut it out completely," Swithers said.
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"People need to be reducing their overall intake of sweeteners whether they have calories or not," says Swithers.
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"Sure, if you're drinking a liter a day, I think sugar will be worse than artificial sweetener," Swithers says.
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Susan Swithers, a professor at Purdue University who has studied artificial sweeteners, agreed that the evidence is still murky.
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"Saccharin was one of the first commercially available artificially sweeteners, and it's actually a derivative of tar," Swithers said.
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Swithers says this may increase your desire to go eat something that actually contains sugar—almost as though the artificial sweetener created an itch your digestive system demands to scratch.
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From a scientific perspective, this finding is suggestive but "not very strong," said Susan Swithers, a professor of psychological sciences at the Purdue University College of Health and Human Sciences.
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"We've gotten to a place where it is normal to drink diet soda because people have the false impression that it is healthier than indulging in a regular soda," Swithers said.
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"You get this very sweet taste; your body says 'I'm about to get sugar; I'm about to get energy,' but those never arrive," Swithers said, based on her research of diet soda consumption in animals.
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"Honestly, I thought that diet soda would be marginally better compared to regular soda in terms of health," said Susan Swithers, the author of this opinion piece and a behavioral neuroscientist and professor of psychological sciences.
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"You've messed up the whole system, so when you consume real sugar, your body doesn't know if it should try to process it because it's been tricked by the fake sugar so many times," Swithers said.
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"Unfortunately, the quality of evidence that would support using sweeteners is not really strong," says Susan Swithers, a professor in the department of psychological studies at Purdue University who has also studied artificial sweeteners (but was not involved in the new study).
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Looking at long-term studies in humans, Swithers noted, the results indicate that people who report drinking artificially sweetened beverages end up at higher risk than non-diet soda drinkers for lots of negative outcomes, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension and stroke, as well as dementia.
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Gogarten, J.P., W.F. Doolittle, and J.G. Lawrence, Prokaryotic evolution in light of gene transfer. Mol Biol Evol, 2002. 19(12): p. 2226-38. One of Gogarten’s current focuses in his research is the evolution of homing endonuclease utilizing parasitic genetic elements (inteins) Swithers K.S., Gogarten J.P. Conservation of Intron and Intein Insertion Sites: Implications for Life Histories of Parasitic Genetic Elements.
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