If you’re someone who’s trying to avoid the unwanted calories of sugar, you may be a drinker of diet sodas instead of regular. But a small new study adds to the growing body of evidence that a commonly used zero-calorie sweetener—sucralose, found in sodas and many sweets and snack foods—may be having an unwanted effect: increasing your appetite.
In a randomized trial, 75 young adults of various weights consumed a drink containing sucralose, sugar, or water. Those consuming the sucralose had greater hunger responses, suggesting that non-caloric sweeteners could affect “key mechanisms in the hypothalamus responsible for appetite regulation,” the study, published on March 26 in Nature Metabolism, reported.
