So insulin is released in response to what? Aspartame's sweet taste or some chemical reaction to it once it's ingested/digested?
Help a biochemically ignorant brother out, Mike.
The theory (I believe it has not been proven yet) is that your body becomes conditioned to expect glucose when sweetness is detected in something you eat or drink. Thus, consuming anything sweet TASTING may elicit an insulin response to the presumed glucose it is expecting.
Human studies are inconclusive, and I believe I know what the missing puzzle is-that you need to have a history of steadily consuming sugary things, sodas maybe specifically, to obtain this conditioning.
What I mean is, some people drink a shit load of soda. If you take a person who has drunk soda for years in large quantities and have them switch to diet soda, I would assume their body would produce insulin as it always has.
However, if you take a person like me for example who doesn't drink much soda or eat sweet foods and have that person drink a diet soda, they may not see a corresponding spike in insulin levels.
I would think, from here, it might be prudent to take a sample of volunteers from all walks of life, age, gender, whatever, a large sample size possibly 1,000 persons and have them drink a diet soda and then monitor both insulin and blood glucose levels.
I say to measure both because IF insulin is produced it might not be purely from conditioned response but possibly other factors. Anyway, if some persons do in fact see a rise in blood insulin levels, we then check for what they have in common like family history of type 2 diabetes, history of drinking sugary beverages, sugary food, are they obese, young old male female etc. and see what we get.
I have theory that for persons who are or were obese and also definitely anyone with a family history of type-2 diabetes sweetened products may spike insulin levels. Not sure, I do not have enough information, and a legit study has not (to my knowledge) been done. I do believe this is important enough to be researched, artificially sweetened products may be directly contributing to the obesity epidemic, more research needs to be done, but it's an interesting premise IMO..
Also, there are also several other causes for an increase in blood sugar levels. Among them are the 'stress' hormones such as adrenaline, several of the steroids, infections, trauma, and of course, the ingestion of food. SO, POSSIBLY there IF there is in fact a spike in insulin levels when drinking diet soda, it's possible there IS a spike in blood sugar preceding the insulin from some kind of a physiological response such as stress or inflammation, I don't know honestly. However, I will say diet soda's bloat me very badly and I no longer drink them.
I can definitely say I lose fat much faster if I totally abandon anything sweet, drinking on water etc. I think there is really something to this idea that artificial sweeteners can contribute to obesity...Just not sure how, yet...
