so when i study intensively, i spend all day just hanging out with my brain, and inevitably, it says interesting things to me:
i was reading about forms of sugar we can't process (e.g. L-glucose, cellulose.. ) and how they were used in artificial sweeteners -- they activate your taste receptors, but can't be metabolized, so they don't count as calories to your body. sounds simple, no?
after my last quarter in endocrinology though, i wonder: the body is amazing at regulating both how we process food and even our very instinct to feel hungry and eat in order to maintain our weight. if it wasn't, we would all become amazingly fat (half a twizzler a day in excess of what you need = 10 pounds in a year). in a sense then, it is this balancing system that matters, not how many calories you consume (of course, if you guzzle massively, you will gain though... but i'm thinking at the margins here).
this brings us back to artificial sweeteners. by binding taste receptors, they trick the body into thinking it is consuming calories, when it actually isn't. this sets of signalling cascades that affect digestion and metabolism (how much energy we consume per unit time), but as the food doesn't match the signals, the system begins to break down. the body asks wtf? and eventually says "screw this".
this is when we become fat.
even when we watch what we eat.
(this would explain the worsening obesity epidemic in america over the last half century)
so obviously this is a rough thought. just typing an outline here -- will follow up next week, after my mcats. P.S. a quick google search shows that some scientists have also begun thinking about this recently (articles i saw were 2008+)...
