Taste, Texture & Weight Loss

Below is an excerpt from Part Two of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

by Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.

The Sweet Sensation

Even with the purely nutritional factors under complete control, it’s difficult to go more than a few days without eating something sweet. If you try to do this, you will begin to crave sweet things—jellybeans, double-fudge ice cream… or the famous Multi-Diet Chocolate Cheesecake.

Scientists have demonstrated that humans and many other species have a strong innate preference for the sensation of sweet. Research has found this strong preference for the sweet taste in animals, newborn infants, and across human cultures. Additionally, when given the chance, humans tend to increase their intake of sweet things. For example, the world production of sugar rose from 8 million tons in 1900 to almost 110 million tons in 1990—a much larger increase than seen with any other food.

In my opinion, the probable reason for this preference for sweet is that in the natural environment, sweetness is a cue for safe edibility.

Despite the clear preference for the sweet taste, research during the past decade has found a surprising disconnection between sweetness and the quantity of food actually eaten. Even though humans have a strong innate preference for the sweet taste, experiments show that neither appetite nor total food intake is particularly increased by the sweet taste alone. So even though you probably like the taste of sweet, it doesn’t necessarily make you eat more food, (all other things being equal).

This finding has been surprising because the usual presumption is that we like sweet because it indicates the presence of sugar—which is a source of energy—and obviously we need energy.

But despite this presumed connection, experiments seem to show that the pleasantness of the sweet sensation is only very weakly connected to appetite or the desire to eat. Perhaps a rough comparison might be to the pleasantness of smelling a sweet perfume—which generally does not stimulate appetite (at least not the appetite for foodJ).

The experiments that demonstrate the above-mentioned disconnection have commonly compared the effects of sweeteners that have Calories (usually glucose or sucrose) to sweeteners that have no Calories (usually aspartame). Generally, these experiments have shown that people who eat things that are artificially sweetened do not eat more later than the people who eat things sweetened with sugar. In other words, people don’t necessarily “make up for” the Calories they didn’t get in the aspartame by eating more food with more Calories.

So we love the sweet taste, but it doesn’t make us eat more food (all other things being equal). This is an apparent contradiction. Fortunately, there is a very intriguing explanation (though admittedly it’s completely speculative).

Why Do We Like Sweet?

Translating into Multi-Diet terminology, we can say that the primitive sub-mind we call “The Beast” seeks out the sweet flavor because this is its cue that it’s found something edible—meaning safe to eat (and usually a plant food).

In other words, the sweet sensation tells The Beast that it has found a food that is probably not poisonous. I suspect that the sensation of “pleasantness” that we feel is The Beast’s reaction to the presumed safety of the food rather than to the energy or other nutritional content of the food.

This suggested mechanism is entirely consistent with threshold theory, which states that the need to eat (hunger) can be triggered by a lack of any essential nutrient, not just by a need for more energy. Most edible plant foods provide many of these essential nutrients besides energy. So a specific trigger for energy would probably “miss the mark” in most cases. For a fascinating review of many of these issues see Ramirez, 1990). Other specialists have made similar points.

There is one further point that is particularly good news to Multi-Dieters. In addition to the above-mentioned more general experiments, there are several reports of specific experiments testing the use of aspartame which concluded that aspartame (a very low Calorie sweetener) makes it easier to stay on a weight-loss diet.

These experiments found that you can stay on a diet more successfully with aspartame than without it. In each case subjects who were told to use aspartame on their low-Calorie diets were able to stay on the diet and “cheat” less than subjects who were told not to use it. These experiments were not designed to test Multi-Diet ideas. However, their conclusions do support the contention of threshold theory, which states that providing “The Beast” with all the things it wants (one of which is the sweet flavor) while also restricting Calories will prevent it from forcing you off your diet before you can lose any serious amount of weight. All of these points mean that we Multi-Dieters can have the sweet sensation we like without the negative effects of sugars (i.e. the Calories, the high glycemic index, or the insulin overreaction) simply by using artificial sweeteners.

The technique of course is simple—use aspartame! It has an insignificant number of Calories and no known negative effects under ordinary circumstances.

(Note: Some people may be mildly allergic to aspartame. If you feel that it may be “unbalancing” you in some way, there are other high-intensity artificial sweeteners that probably work just as well for this purpose. And of course you may always use natural sweeteners if you make sure you count the natural Calories that come with them)