Diet foods and artificial sweeteners may trigger weight gain and increase the risk of diabetes. As scientists say, the sweet taste fools the body’s metabolism into believing that we are consuming more calories. In nature, sweetness signals the presence of energy and its intensity reflects the amount of energy present.

When a beverage is either too sweet or not sweet enough for the number of calories it contains, the metabolic response and the signal that communicates nutritional value to the brain are disrupted, according to researchers from Yale University. A sweet-tasting, lower-calorie drink can trigger a greater metabolic response than drinks with higher calories, explaining the association between artificial sweeteners and diabetes discovered in earlier studies, researchers say.

A study, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that sweetness helps to determine how calories are metabolised and signalled to the brain. When sweetness and calories are matched, the calories are metabolised, and this is registered by the brain’s reward circuits.

However, when a mismatch occurs, the calories fail to trigger the body’s metabolism and the reward circuits in the brain fail to register that calories have been consumed. Dana Small, a professor at Yale University, says it best: “the assumption that more calories trigger greater metabolic and brain response is wrong.”

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