1. It makes our bodies produce insulin.
Have you ever planned to tell a lie, and completely forgot to come up with all the extra lies that this one lie would force you to tell? I told an ex-girlfriend once I went to the movies with my friend Charles, she asked, “Who is Charles?” I didn’t think that far ahead, and I had nothing to say, so I just said his name twice as if that meant this imaginary person was more real, “You know Charles, Charles”
Artificial Sweeteners are me and your pancreas is my ex-girlfriend. Insulin, secreted by the pancreas, is how the human body stores sugar. When the taste of artificial sweeteners hits your brain, it automatically sends a signal to your pancreas to begin producing insulin. Insulin is what tells our cells to either use sugar as food or stores it as fat–without it, our bodies can’t process the sugar that lands in our bloodstreams. The lie starts here when your pancreas produces insulin to deal with anticipated sugar, but then no sugar arrives, it confuses your body and disrupts its metabolic process. This may explain why several studies have shown a link between regularly drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome, a collection of symptoms that includes larger waist circumference, higher blood pressure, and higher blood sugar. The artificial sweeteners tell the first lie but have no other information to back it up.
2. It conditions our taste buds for sweetness.
Lays potato chips used to have a slogan, “Bet you can’t eat just one”. I’ve never been one to pass up a challenge, so I would buy the bag to attempt to just eat one chip. My mission was never accomplished. You probably know or have observed that the more regularly you taste something “bad” (sweetness, saltiness, etc.) the more inured to it you become. This is why people who stop eating sugar or salt suddenly find any foods extremely salty or extremely sweet.
Artificial sweeteners are dramatically sweeter than sugar, and although it may not register that way on your tongue, diet soda is in fact much sweeter than regular soda. All that sweetness accompanied by zero calories confuses your brain as well as your metabolic processes and tends to leave you craving sugar more than before.