Side note, I made a video for it as part of my senior capstone. I often think about making an updated version. For one thing, I'm not sure if everything in it is correct. On top of that, I was incredibly tired, because the only time I could reserve the space I needed was after midnight. I also flubbed a few lines and lost all my b-roll, so editing was a nightmare. In any case, here's the video I did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZGSBi0OFwM
There are so many things I'd like to change about that video.
My graduating class was the first one at my college that was required to perform a senior capstone to graduate, so everything was done by the seat of my pants. I learned later that the Biology department actually used my project as the example for what they wanted all projects to be like. It's far from perfect, but my goal was to take what I had learned and share the information in a way the general public could understand.
I was a little overambitious. I learned later that several professors thought I wasn't going to graduate. (I wish I had known that at the time, I would have been doubly motivated.) I'm pretty jealous of the younger students, they turned an old building in to a film studio for producing videos like this. My rig was a bunch of halogen work lights and the best camera I could afford at the time (read: really terrible).
The capstone project is why I'm 100% in favor of requiring open journal access. With journal access, anyone can contribute to the scientific community (and society as a whole). I made a video, but people can come up with their own questions and try to answer them, such as the question you asked. Watching the projects other people are doing on YouTube, I'm 100% convinced that open journal access would lead to a scientific revolution.
[1]By coating inert mineral particles that have no caloric value with sugar molecules, DouxMatok developed a sugar substitute that (allegedly) tastes just like pure sugar.
The sugar-dusted particles have the same amount of sweet surface area as a full sugar particle. Because this is the only part of the particle that touches your tongue, the DouxMatok substitute triggers the same perception of sweetness as real sugar when it hits your sweet taste receptors.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a18737/sugar-...
Honestly, my biggest take away from the research is that there is no substitute for eating healthy. For instance, vitamin supplements don't appear to convey the same health benefits as consuming the vitamins in foods in which they naturally occur. There are a lot of reasons for this, but what my take away was that it is easier to eat a balanced diet, than it is to eat a poor diet and then fix it through science. Same goes for health in general really -- it's better to take steps to stay healthy, than it is to lose your health and try to get it back.
But tasted where ? do we have any knowledge what happens when the tongue measures one level of sweetness and the gut another ?
And don't the case of the gastric bypass implies that if the gut senses less sugar(either because of less sensors, or because of less sugar) , we get positive results ?
>> no substitute for eating healthy.. than fix through science.
Currently that's good health advice, i agree.
Given that fact, we can speculate that sweet things that aren't absorbed might be more harmful than ones that are absorbed, as they have a chance to activate taste buds all the way through the gut as they go past, rather than just the earlier ones.
Hopefully the guys at DouxMatok are think about this and optimizing their sweetener to quickly dissolve in the gut.
And sure, this definetly needs full animal testing before claiming things about it.
It would be easy to test that real solution by comparing diets from a place where they don't eat as much sugar.
That being said, there is a lot of easy research that never happens. There are a lot of reasons. Funding is difficult to get, and it's hard to get funding to research things that are "obvious". Furthermore, there are a limited number of scientists -- they have to choose what they are going to research.
I guess one good thing is I usually chew it after a meal, but I do occasionally chew on an empty stomach if I'm having trouble burping.
I'd still recommend chewing gum, but you'd have to weigh the evidence for yourself, cause I'm not a doctor. However I believe the oral health benefits outweigh the potential risks. Acid reflux is also correlated with a lot of really nasty health issues, like esophageal cancer and heart disease. (It's my understanding that the heart disease link may be due to the elevated calcium levels caused by consuming large quantities of antacids) If chewing gum helps control your acid reflux I'd keep chewing gum. I'm actually considering this myself now that you mention it, since I suffer from acid reflux as well.
Chewing gum greatly reduces the amount of antacids I need to consume. The other thing that really surprised me was my low-carb diet further reduced antacid use to almost zero. For a month after my low-carb diet, I didn't even think to take a single antacid.
On a somewhat related note, my non-expert opinion is that sugarless gum is probably still better for you than gum with actual sugar in it for reasons relating to oral heath.
One of the things that is most interesting is that they have found the same proteins that form our taste buds in the walls of our small intestine. It appears that the gut "tastes" food and "tells" the body what kind of food is coming and how to prepare for it. One of these pathways ends up producing insulin.
The interesting thing when it comes to sugar is that sweetness is not directly correlated with caloric content (or glycemic index, which is the measure of the sugar insulin actually works on). An obvious example are artificial sugars, which taste incredibly sweet and have zero calories. Natural sugars vary in sweetness as well though - using sucrose/table sugar as a baseline, fructose is 1.73 times sweeter for its caloric content. Furthermore, fructose a glycemic index of 19, compared to 55 for table sugar.
This is really interesting because body regulates hormone levels with feedback loops. So, if the taste buds in your gut taste sweetness and initially trigger a release of insulin that would be appropriate for table sugar, you could have 5 times more insulin floating around in your blood stream than your body was expecting. This might trigger some of these sugar taste buds to stop sending the signal to release insulin when they taste sweetness.
Worst case scenario is when someone drinks a diet pop on an empty stomach. All of the sudden there is the HUGE burst of sweetness, with no sugar in the bloodstream for the insulin to bind to.
This might seem very speculative, but there is some physical evidence that the body actually behaves this way. When a gastric bypass is preformed, a length of the small intestine closest to the stomach is removed. This section would have the most deactivated "taste buds", since it would be receiving the full load of unabsorbed sugars from the stomach. "Taste buds" further down the small intestine would not be deactivated because they haven't been triggering falsely.
Indeed, after the surgery, people appear to lose weight much faster than expected based on their previous metabolic rate, and their diabetic symptoms decrease far more than expected as well.
The question I get asked the most after talking about this is whether it's better to drink diet pop or normal pop. Unfortunately, it appears the best thing to do is to not drink pop at all. Limiting your sugar intake is a good idea for a lot of reasons, and soda is just far too sweet and/or too sugary to be healthy as a regular part of your diet.