Shutterstock

Artificial sweeteners like Splenda, aspartame, and Sweet’N Low have been receiving virtually any health experts no-no list for a few years now. But regardless of the odd stream of negative press surrounding them, the majority of women body fat discover their whereabouts as being a unfortunate requirement, allowing us to get our cake and eat it too. (Even though said cake carries a strange metallic aftertaste and weird texture.) But now new information turns that concept on its head because, well, the stuff might be leading you to gain.

Wait, what? How could a thing that has literally zero calories be adding inches to your waistlines? Sucralose, the substitute sweetener in Splenda, tricks our bodies into thinking they’re starving, reported by research published in Cell Metabolism. Within the study animals were fed sometimes a sugar-sweetened treat or one produced from Splenda, and then allowed to eat because their regular chow as they simply liked. Within 72 hours, the Splenda group was consuming Thirty percent more calories per day-far in excess of the Splenda was “saving” in calories. (See: 10 Kinds of Sweeteners Which might be Sneaking Their Way Into What you eat.)

It all is because of him how the brain perceive sweet things, said Gregory Neely, an operational geneticist along at the University of Sydney in Australia and another with the study’s senior authors. Mental performance pathways impacted by artificial sweeteners are the ones that make food taste better if you are starving, then it may just be why eating them might make us even hungrier.

Clearly these studies boosts the body of existing research around the complications with low calorie sweeteners, nevertheless, consider this was only performed on animals. More studies need to be done on actual people before we could draw any real conclusions.

In the meantime, though, this really is the best time to finally kick that Diet Coke habit. Here’s six more items you might learn if you undertake.