Medics have named the healthiest sweetener for the brain
Because high amounts of sugar in the diet are associated with health risks, many people are switching to sweeteners. Researchers from China and Brazil compared the brain's response to sweeteners and identified the most "compatible" one.
Previous studies have shown that sweets can have a negative impact on both a person's health and how they are perceived by others. According to scientific works, fast carbohydrates in large quantities became the cause of serious physical and mental illness, and sweet for breakfast made people less attractive in the eyes of members of the opposite sex. Sugar substitutes, although they too can cause harm if consumed in excess, are less caloric and safer for health.
Researchers from Shanghai University of Science and Technology (China), Henan University of Technology (China), Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of São Paulo (Brazil) and Guangzhou Southern Medical University (China) compared how the brains of mice react to different sweeteners. The sweetener stevia, which is derived from the plant of the same name, turned out to be the most "compatible" with it. The corresponding scientific article was published in the journal Neuroscience Research.
The experiment involved 150 eight-week-old mice, which were divided into six groups of 25 rodents each. The mice in the control group were fed a combination of different sweeteners, while sugar, stevia, xylitol, glycyrrhizin or mogroside were added to the food for the others.
To track the brain's response to each of the sweeteners or to a mixture of them, the scientists recorded the activity of neurons in the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus in real time, monitoring calcium levels in the cells. The activity that was recorded in response to stevia turned out to be similar to the brain's response to sugar. This means that stevia is most "compatible" with the brain and reflects the perceived taste of sugar better than other popular sweeteners.
"This suggests that stevia could potentially be the most beneficial sugar substitute for the brain. Therefore, stevia should be given more attention in the relevant food and beverage industries," explained one of the authors of the paper.
In the future, scientists plan to find out how the human brain reacts to different sugar substitutes and whether the results of the experiment, which involved mice, will be repeated. To study the activity of the human brain will be with the help of MRI.
It is worth remembering that the situation with sweeteners is not always unambiguous either. For example, it was previously shown that at least some mass-produced sweeteners raise the risk of impaired glucose tolerance (considered an important element in the development of type 2 diabetes).