Text/Chen Gen
With continued attention to healthy eating, the anti-sugar movement is on the rise. Carbonated sparkling water and sugar-free milk tea with "0 sugar, 0 fat and 0 calorie" as the selling point have strongly impacted the status of carbonated drinks as "fat house happy water". In 2019's Double 11 and this year's 618, the sales of "0 Sugar" Yuanqi Forest exceeded that of high-sugar Coca-Cola, and won the first place in Tmall beverage sales.
At the same time, the huge market potential has attracted a number of beverage industry giants such as Yili, Jianlibao and Nestle, as well as milk tea brands such as CoCo Duke and Naixue's tea to continue to join the domestic "sugar-free" beverage track.
From sugar addiction to sugar substitute, is it an inevitable trend of health, or is there another hidden feeling? Whether to eat sugar or sugar substitutes has always been a problem that plagues people.
Why do people love sugar?
Sweetness is one of the most basic sensory sensations for humans and other animals. From cola and milk tea to various candies and ice cream, sugar brings people taste comfort in many cases, including relieving anxiety and pleasant emotions.
Sugar stimulates the brain to secrete a neurotransmitter, dopamine. When the human body is obsessed with the pleasure that sugar brings to the human body and increases the intake, the dopamine naturally secreted by the brain will decrease, and the dependence of brain cells on it will increase, so that the dopamine receptors in the cells will decrease.
This is also the so-called negative regulatory effect: only more sugar can produce the same pleasure as before. At the same time, eating and sex bring less and less pleasure to the human body. If a substance can stimulate pleasure in the reward area of the brain, but does not produce a negative regulatory effect, it will not be addictive; if it can stimulate pleasure and produce a negative regulatory effect, it may be addictive.
In the study of the addictiveness of sugar, french scientist Serge Ahmed has done experiments. He first fed the mice cocaine pills continuously for about a month, making them addicted; then added sugar pills to choose one or the other, and despite some hesitation, the mice turned to sugar pills for two days. This means that sugar and cocaine have similar effects on the brain.
In his report, Ahmed further explained that sugar beats cocaine because the nerve receptors in the brain responsible for feeling sugar are 14 times higher than cocaine.
In addition, in April, a study published in Nature once again gave a new interpretation of "sugar addiction" from a neurobiological perspective. Specifically, the team did a test with sugar and sweeteners. The scientists added sugar or Acesulfame K to the "drinks" prepared for mice, which are a sweetener often used in sugar-free sodas, preserves and other products.
At first, the mice drank both drinks. By the next day, they had almost completely abandoned the sweetener. In addition, mice that have had their sweetened receptors removed will not taste sweet on their tongues and will prefer to choose real sugar.
In further research, the researchers used chemical genetic techniques to express activated artificially engineered receptors (hM3Dq, an artificially designed receptor activated only by artificially designed drugs) in "sugar neurons" in mice, and added artificially designed drugs from the DREADD system (clozapine) to drinking water. Through the DREADD system, the researchers were able to manipulate mice's "sugar neurons" and related behaviors with the Clozapine small molecule chemical to create new preferences for a beverage taste that would otherwise have no preference.
The discovery reveals a post-ingestion sugar sensing pathway that is critical to the development of sugar preference and reveals a fundamental circuit behind the high appetite effects of sugar.
Neurobiologically-based sugar addiction explains the increasing thirst for sugar. 500 years ago, sugar was only a pastime for the European nobility. In the 18th century, per capita sugar consumption in Britain quadrupled, and in the 19th century it quadrupled. In the United States during the same period, sugar consumption reached 16 times. A 2008 survey found that Chinese eat 19.6 kilograms of sugar a year per capita, a five-fold increase from 30 years ago.
Is "sugar-free" really "sugar-free"?
Today, sugar is everywhere in the human diet. With people's continued attention to healthy eating, people also seem to be aware of the new burden that excess sugar brings to the human body, and sugar control exercise came into being.
In the context of sugar control, sugar-free beverages such as Coke Zero and Diet Coke are also becoming more and more popular with people and the market. These "sugar-free" beverages are mainly sugar substitutes, that is, in addition to sugar, they replace sugar with another substance that adds sweetness to food.
Sweeteners can be divided into natural sweeteners and artificial sweeteners. Natural sweeteners are generally extracted from plants, such as steviol glycosides (steviol, steviol), which is a natural sweetener extracted from stevia, with a sweetness of about 200 times that of sucrose, and the taste is very close to sucrose. Monk fruit glycosides are natural sweeteners extracted from the fruit of monk fruit and are about 240 times sweeter than sucrose.
Synthetic sweeteners are sweeteners that people synthesize through some chemical reactions. The first artificial sweetener discovered by saccharin scientists is to first use the toluene method to generate the intermediate product of o-toluenesulfonamide, and then o-toluenesulfonamide is oxidized and acid-analyzed to generate saccharin, and the sweetness of saccharin is 300 times that of sucrose.
Aspartame is another common sweetener, scientifically known as aspartylphenylalanine methyl ester, which is made by condensation of aspartic acid and phenylalanine, and aspartame is about 200 times sweeter than sucrose. In addition, the current common sugar substitutes include acesulfame potassium, xylitol, neostens, saccharin, cyclamate, steviol glycosides, sucralose and the like.
Because these sweeteners require only a small amount to produce enough sweetness and contain almost no calories, they are also called low-calorie sweeteners, non-nutritive sweeteners. So, in the context of the "sugar-free" beverage epidemic, will these healthy-sounding promises really come true? Is "sugar-free" really "sugar-free"?
For this question, Mumiko Ōnishi, M.D., of the Cancer Research Center of Harvard University in the United States, gave the answer in "Sugar-free is More Deadly": "In the past, it was generally believed that artificial sweeteners were not used by the body to produce energy, and there are current studies showing that although artificial sweeteners are different from direct metabolism such as glucose to raise blood sugar, they may affect the body's energy intake and metabolism through a variety of ways, and have a certain relationship with obesity, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome." ”
In addition, a study published in Cell Metabolism by a research team led by Yale University in the United States found that sucralose and carbohydrates were lowered to reduce sensitivity to sweetness, which may impair insulin sensitivity. Sucralose is almost not metabolically degraded, and with the production and life of human beings discharged into the environment, its harm has attracted the attention of toxicology and environmental science scholars around the world.
A 2019 large study of 450,000 people in 10 European countries, conducted by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), found that people who drank two or more of these sweet drinks per day had a higher risk of all-cause death than those who drank fewer than one soft drink per month (sugary or artificially sweetened one).
Through national health databases, the research team collected data on their deaths over the next decade. During a follow-up period of an average of 16.4 years, a total of 41,693 deaths occurred.
The population that drank soft drinks the most often (two or more drinks per day, ≥ 500ml) had a significantly higher overall mortality rate of 17% compared to those who drank the least (less than 1 drink per month, about 250ml).
It is worth mentioning that artificial sweetener drinks have a greater impact. Drinking artificial sweetener soft drinks most often was associated with a 26 percent increased overall risk of death. The largest number of people who drank sugary soft drinks had an 8 percent increased overall risk of death.
Eat sugar or eat sugar substitutes
From sugar-hungry to sugar-free, health and happiness are every consumer's expectation, but it's never been easy to combine. In essence, all the "0" sugars on the market today are still a "concept" story. Whether there are sugary or sugar-free beverages, their popularity and success, their cognition and value output of sugar, undoubtedly reflect the brand's comprehensive judgment based on consumer psychology and insight of the times, so it will take advantage of the momentum.
In fact, diet is only what the human body ingests, and nutritional status is the physiological result of the individual. Each person's metabolism and distribution of nutritional energy are unique, so "diet" itself is not a determinant of the causes of obesity and cardiovascular disease. In other words, the cause of metabolic diseases is physiological conditions rather than food and drink.
The mammalian body is an "ecosystem" in which cells compete for calories. Cell type, number, and metabolic activity determine the body's calorie intake, energy expenditure, and nutrient allocation. Thus, the number of calories consumed and the allocation of those calories in anabolic, oxidation, or storage are not determined by the dietary sugars themselves or any other component of the "diet," but by cellular competition arising from cellular and metabolic demands.
Sweetness is one of the most basic and important sensory feelings of humans and other animals, and sugar production brings people taste comfort in many cases, including relieving anxiety and pleasant emotions. Sugar production is understandable, but it also requires moderation. Eating sugar or eating sugar substitutes is actually very simple.