Swithers Susan E
Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, 703 Third Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA.
Behav Anal. 2015 Mar 12;38(1):1-17. doi: 10.1007/s40614-015-0028-3. eCollection 2015 May.
While no single factor accounts for the significant increases in overweight and obesity that have emerged during the past several decades, evidence now suggests that sugars, in general, and sugar-sweetened beverages, in particular, may be especially problematic. One response to this concern has been an explosion in the availability and use of noncaloric sweeteners as replacements for sugar. While consumers have been led to believe that such substitutes are healthy, long-term epidemiological data in a number of cohorts have documented increased risk for negative outcomes like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke among users of artificial sweeteners. Experimental data from animals has provided several plausible mechanisms that could explain this counterintuitive relationship. In particular, my research has demonstrated that artificial sweeteners appear to interfere with basic learned, predictive relations between sweet tastes and post-ingestive consequences such as the delivery of energy. By interfering with these relations, artificial sweeteners inhibit anticipatory responses that normally serve to maintain physiological homeostasis, and over the long term, this interference could result in negative health effects like those seen in the human cohort studies. These data suggest that reducing the consumption of all sweeteners is advisable to promote better health.
虽然没有单一因素能解释过去几十年中超重和肥胖现象的显著增加，但现在有证据表明，一般而言糖，尤其是含糖饮料，可能特别成问题。对此担忧的一种回应是，无热量甜味剂作为糖的替代品，其可得性和使用量激增。虽然消费者一直被引导相信这些替代品是健康的，但多个队列的长期流行病学数据表明，人工甜味剂使用者患2型糖尿病、心脏病和中风等负面结果的风险增加。来自动物的实验数据提供了几种可能解释这种违反直觉关系的机制。特别是，我的研究表明，人工甜味剂似乎会干扰甜味与摄入后后果（如能量供应）之间基本的习得性预测关系。通过干扰这些关系，人工甜味剂会抑制通常用于维持生理稳态的预期反应，从长期来看，这种干扰可能会导致负面健康影响，就像在人类队列研究中看到的那样。这些数据表明，为了促进更好的健康，建议减少所有甜味剂的消费。
