[StackRanker3000]

This seems like a fancy way of saying “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.

What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency?

What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?

If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.

[chithanh]

> “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.

No, not at all.

Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer.

This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect.

> What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?

When it comes to soft drinks and all-cause mortality, artificially sweetened is not better nor worse than sugar. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478

When it comes to weight, results are either neutral or inconclusive.

[StackRanker3000]

Cheers. Do you have any citations handy for the old studies? I’m open to being wrong, but after some very brief searching and reading I’m skeptical that they properly controlled for increased feed intake (possibly due to palatability) to conclusively determine that some other mechanism was at play

[chithanh]

The original study was:

DALDERUP, L., VISSER, W. Effects of Sodium Cyclamate on the Growth of Rats compared with other Variations in the Diet. Nature 221, 91–92 (1969) https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0

But of course the manufacturers of feed additives also extensively studied which artificial sweetener compositions achieve body mass gain / feed efficiency increase for which group of animals. There is an extensive review e.g. on pigs here:

https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14203032

[StackRanker3000]

Thanks! I’ll take a look