Your Diet Coke is making you eat more, says new research

Think you’re doing good when you use an artificial sweetener in your morning latte instead of normal sugar? Or picking the diet option with your fizzy drinks?

Think again. A new Aussie study suggests artificial sweeteners can actually make you eat more food – 30 percent more, to be precise.

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Researchers at the University of Sydney found that when fruit flies were given a diet including artificial sweetener, they ate a third more when they were then given naturally sweetened food.

It’s believed if you eat sweeteners but don’t get the equivalent amount of calories, your brain urges you to eat more to compensate.

"Our conclusions from this study were that the sweetness and energy content of food are integrated in reward centres in the animals' brain," said Associate Professor Greg Neely. "When they're out of balance, the brain responds and corrects it by promoting more or less food intake, in this case more food intake.”

For Greg, it was his own increased appetite after drinking diet soft drink that sparked his interest in doing the study.

And it’s not just your appetite that’s affected, with sweeteners also causing hyperactivity and for the fruit flies to act as if they were in a fasting state, which led to disrupted sleep patterns.

The good news?

Give it three days without the sweet stuff, and your body will return to normal.

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