Scientific American says that your brain responds to artificial sweeteners differently than to sugar:
Sweeteners, real or artificial, bind to and stimulate receptors on the taste buds, which then signal the brain via the cranial nerve. Although both sugar and Splenda initiate the same taste and pleasure pathways in the brain—and the subjects could not tell the solutions apart—the sugar activated pleasure-related brain regions more extensively than the Splenda did. [...]
[Psychiatrist Guido Frank, now at the University of Colorado at Denver] suggests that when we taste Splenda, the reward system becomes activated but not satiated. “Our hypothesis is that Splenda has less of a feedback mechanism to stop the craving, to get satisfied.”
In addition, both sweets and fats signal from the stomach and intestines….
perhaps the guts are smarter than the mouth… or at least for the original program of finding enough valid food when it was scarce.
L DeGroff
June 7th, 2008