According to a study by Purdue University , sweeteners, useful in low-calorie diets to keep the daily energy intake under control and present in snacks, sweets, desserts and light drinks, not only do not promote weight loss, but they would cause, apparently, normal sugars , the metabolic syndrome . Indeed, not being registered by our brain as a sweet substance, by not stimulating insulin, they push us to eat more. The advice, as always, is not to overdo it, neither with sweeteners, nor with light foods. And if you believe that this is true only for artificial sweeteners, you are wrong. Natural sweeteners are also being blamed.

While in the United States the intervention of the endocrinologist Robert Lustig on fructose caused a sensation last year (from consuming less fruit to NOT consuming sugar, sweets, refined cereals), entitled Sugar, the bitter truth , in Italy he is the epidemiologist Franco Berrino to be among our most authoritative voices who have declared war on sugar. Here is what, for example, he said about natural and artificial sweeteners in an interview with Expo Magazine : “Sweetened drinks and artificially sweetened drinks cause diabetes.. A study of 100,000 French teachers showed that even those who took “ZERO” drinks, that is, without sugar, but with artificial sweeteners, got more diabetes. These sweeteners don’t get your blood sugar “high”, but they do increase glucose absorption. The same probably applies to stevia, which is talked about a lot today. The crucial issue is precisely the intensity of sweet taste: in the intestine we have taste sensors that when substances arrive hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, they open the doors for the absorption of glucose. Paradoxically, blood sugar could rise more if we sweeten with stevia – 200 times sweeter – than with sugar “.