Science

IIRC that was a popular opinion about artificial sweeteners for a while because pigs are raised on food with sweeteners, to make them eat more. That doesn't mean sweeteners make you hungrier though, just that pigs like to eat sweet things so they eat more of it.

Supposedly the study already accounted for that (amount and quality of food eaten).

Satiety is helpful in managing the "calories in" half of weight loss, but it's not an absolute must. Knowing when it's safe to ignore hunger and doing so when you've already used up you're caloric budget for the day is a huge part of successful weight loss. Basically same spiel with the "calories out" end. Working out can be fun (which is helpful because it makes you want to do it), but a lot of times it's not - but if you want to lose weight, you do it anyway.

Interesting, but also suspicious. "How much a person eats and the quality of their diet" is pretty much the entirety of "calories in", so if artificial sweeteners are sabotaging weight loss, it'll be on the "calories out" end, which is where metabolism and exercise come into play... which is absolutely a part of the equation that can be influenced, but not the part that sweeteners are typically involved in.

I am a schmuck on the interwebs who went to school for microbiology and I can say for certain that the human body does not violate the 1st law of thermodynamics. Calorie deficit = your body must free up stored energy (in fat) to have enough energy to continue breathing = weight loss. Unless your body is able to create sustainable free energy out of a vacuum or unless you have a horrible genetic disorder that breaks down your bones for energy or unless you are dead

Sure, but wouldn't the calorimeter's reading still be the theoretical maximum since it's based on thermodynamics? In other words, an inefficient metabolism may see a net gain of fewer calories, but it shouldn't ever see greater.

I've not used a calorimeter, but my understanding is that is just measures heat energy from burning things. Things like sucralose and aspertame likely WOULD read as caloric in that kind of measurement, because they contain chemical energy. The reason those sweeteners read as 0 in nutrition labels is because of how we metabolize food. Or in this case, how we don't: we can't digest sucralose and similar sweeteners. It goes in, your tongue says "yay!" and you poop it out.

Also a schmuck on interweb; but healthcare is my area of expertise, so I've got a handful of college level human anatomy & physiology, nutrition, and microbiology courses to draw from here. I was also a fatass who wanted to join the military back in the day, which required losing a lot of weight - decided to approach it as scientifically as possible (there's a LOT of fad misinformation surrounding weightloss), and I can't complain about the results.

That's my point - it makes no sense. They're either overlooking something, or artificials have some influence on the calories out side of weight loss that we don't know about.

I mostly agree with your point, just substitute "genetics" for the actual array of reasons why we have an obesity epidemic. Environment, upbringing, emotional state, level of education, financial resources, access to healthy food, sedentary lifestyle, disordered eating habits, trauma, medications, hormonal imbalances, physical and mental health, etc.

It's common sense that people trying to lose weight are more likely to reach for non-caloric products, and with other studies showing that most people who lose weight will gain it back within 5-10 years, it's makes this study's results obvious and proves nothing new unfortunately. Sweeteners very well could be an independent cause of weight gain, but until they account for all of the confounding factors that influence why people gain and lose weight, they won't be able to determine its true role in the matter.

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