The Impact of Artificial Sweeteners on Insulin, Body Composition and Drink Choice in Mice

Abstract

The average American consumes almost 42 gallons of artificially sweetened beverages per year and about 66 pounds of sucrose. Although the USFDA supports that aspartame and stevia are safe for consumption, both nutritive and non‐nutritive sweeteners have been shown to negatively impact health. Sucrose causes addictive behaviors as well as excessive release of dopamine. Our study was designed to determine the behaviors and physiological changes in mice associated with consumption of aspartame and stevia when compared with sucrose. We exposed mice to untainted water or water containing 0.2% aspartame, 0.2% stevia, or 0.2% sucrose for 8 weeks, then provided the animals with a two‐bottle, treated and untreated, choice test for an additional week. After 9 weeks of treatment, mice were sacrificed and body composition, blood glucose, and serum insulin were determined. Stevia animals gained significantly more body weight than all other groups (p<0.05) and consumed significantly more food than controls (p<0.05). All treatment animals consumed significantly more fluid than control animals (p<0.05). When provided with the two‐bottle choice, the treated animals chose the sweetened drink significantly more than untreated water (p<0.05), while the control animals consumed water equally from both bottles. Aspartame treated animals had significantly heavier relative heart weights (p<0.05). We found no significant difference in relative liver weights, blood glucose or serum insulin concentrations in this short term test. These results are consistent with previous studies reporting addictive behavior with sucrose consumption. Current work is focused on the presence of brain lesions and dopamine release with exposure to sugar versus substitutes.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.