Unintended consequences

This month's Scientific American (April 2015) has an interesting short article called "Artificial Sweeteners Get a Gut Check."  The article discusses some animal studies relating to what happens when they eat artificial sweeteners instead of sugar.  The available evidence, and expectations, are that people react similarly.

The bottom line is pretty simple, for a large group of the population artificial sweeteners cause obesity and many other problems, including diabetes as well as liver and heart disease. 

The reasons for this are rather complicated, but I think the following description is close to being correct in the overview.  These sweeteners change the microbe population in the gut, removing those that are good at breaking down sugar and replacing them with bacteria that is good at turning the other things into "energy" for the body.  The impact is that more energy gets to the blood stream than would have normally been the case.  These bacteria also change the way that the body deals with this extra energy, increasing the bodies efficiency for creating fat, causing the body to store it away as more fat.  As if that weren't enough, the changed bacteria population causes changes in behavior, causing the animal to eat more. 

The impact is that the more you try to lose weight by cutting out sugar, then easier it is to put on fat and crave food more, making you fight to limit calorie intake, which screws up your overall diet.  The combination of too much fat and poor diet, and apparently some direct impacts of the new gut population increase the list of illnesses plus others. 

One of the tricky things about this is that while all people get the change in gut populations, it is only those who are genetically pre-disposed to putting on weight that get the double wammy of storing more fat.  Those who don't have those genes apparently can withstand the change in bacteria without adding on more pounds. 

This all lines up with my observations of the years.   I reject the idea that the obesity epidemic is just because people eat too much and eat to rich.  Of course that is the case for some people, but there are an awful lot of people who are careful with their diet, eat balanced meals, and eat a heck of a lot less than a lot of the skinny folks - but they still keep getting fatter. It seems obvious to me that something else is going on - probably something related to the chemicals that we are exposed to.  Artificial sweeteners fall exactly into the area that could be a big cause of the problem.  In fact, this article makes it pretty clear that not only might this be a big part of the problem, it almost certainly is.

The good thing is that it can be reversed.  All you need to do is kill off all of the gut bacteria and then get a new crop of bacteria, hopefully from someone who doesn't eat these chemicals.  Sounds a bit extreme, I wonder if it is going to become common practice. Without that it appears that the "bad" bacteria can stay dominate for many years, causing havoc the entire time.

Now I am wondering about "lite" beer.  Many people drink lite beer to limit their calorie intake.  My observation is that isn't what happens.  What I see happen is that people drink beer partly because they like it, but mostly to get a buzz (for the effects of the alcohol).  While lite beer only has 1/2 the calories because it only has half the alcohol, my observation is that people just go ahead and drink twice as much!  Same amount of alcohol, but twice the whatever else they are drinking.  Personally, I avoid lite beer as much as possible partly because it tastes nasty, and partly because I have to drink too much of it.  I am MUCH happier drinking beer that I enjoy the taste of, and limit my alcohol intake by limiting the volume of liquid I drink.  I wonder what other "unintended consequences" will show up with whatever processes are done to make lite beer instead of plain old fashioned "heavy" beer.