Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and his friends felt as if they were getting fatter after eating no fat yogurt? 

The entire episode involved the group of friends taking this supposed no fat yogurt to a lab to get it tested to see if it really was no fat. 

Of course, in typical Seinfeld format, the samples at the lab get mixed up and they get an erronous reading so we never really knew if the yogurt was no fat.

This week, a new study from Purdue University uncovered a similar debacle – the fact that non-sugar sweetners seemed to cause test rats to get fatter. 

In “Sugar Substitutes May Contribute To Weight Gain” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/11/AR2008021101069.html the story suggests that lab testing showed the more sugar free substitute given to rats, the fatter they got.

The theory behind this sounds a little far-fetched to me… but basically the arguement is that a rat’s body metabolism adjusts due to certain taste senses being heightened.  So, in other words, when a rat tatsts sweetness from sugar and typically expects calories to come along with that sweetness, their metabolism is trained to burn more calories – even generating more body heat in the process.

Yet, after multiple feedings of food containing artificial sweetners the metabolism didn’t kick in to the same degree and thus did not burn as much fat resulting in weight gain instead of weight loss.

Personally, I find the conclusions drawn from this research to be on shaky ground and so the jury is still out.  If someone wanted to look for criticism of artificial sweetners, there are many other health implications that should be examined first such as some studies demonstrating links with cancer, nerve diseases and other brain related conditions.