Does artificial sweeteners cause carb cravings?

[PaulL]

Being eaten by a tiger is perfectly natural.

Bingo! Moreover, even with beneficial things, there is a limit. It is possible to die from drinking too much water, or from too much oxygen.

The key thing with natural ingredients and whole foods is that there’s a longer track record.

Meat has been part of the human diet for something like two million years, whereas agriculture was discovered only about ten or twelve thousand years ago. Sugar was known in classical antiquity, but it was labour-intensive and expensive to refine, so conditions such as gout and dental caries were diseases of the rich until about a century ago, when modern industrial refining methods made sugar cheap for all. And industrial seed oils have been available for only a couple of decades longer than cheap sugar.

Given the archaeological evidence showing that agricultural societies are much sicker than hunter-gatherer ones, it should not surprise us that adding quantities of refined sugar and seed oils to the human diet might have deleterious effects.

[Carnivoor]

By definition: NATURAL

" 1Existing in or derived from nature; not made or caused by humankind."

In the context of food:

“1. 1.1Having had a minimum of processing or preservative treatment.”

I would argue that the only Natural sweetner would be Honey. It needs no proccesing or presevatives.

On the other hand, “minimum of processing” is poorly quantified in the definition, so those who call refined sugar natural ate not wrong.

I like Jack’s idea of calling food with a long track record Natural.
But at least 30.000 years long, 12.000 is not a lot in evolutionary terms.

[amwassil]

The Human Sweet Tooth

Variation in preference and desire

Aside from individual differences in our ability to detect and perceive the intensity of a sweet taste, there are large differences among people in the degree to which they like highly sweetened foods. Human subjects have been divided into two types. Type I responders are subjects who like increasing concentrations of sucrose up to a middle range of concentration, followed by a breakpoint after which preference decreases with increasing concentration. For these people, some foods and drinks are too sweet past a certain point, and this pattern is sometimes referred to as an inverted U-shape. The Type II response is characterized by increased liking as the concentration increases, which levels off but does not decrease as concentration increases further [18,19]. For these people, there is no such thing as too sweet. Although the classification of human subjects into two categories is probably too simple to capture the range of human responses to sweeteners, it highlights the dissimilarity among people.

Type III: Sweet serves no useful purpose and the sooner lost the better.