If you’ve visited the supermarket even once in the past several years – and I think that accounts for just about everyone in the western world – you’ve no doubt noticed the abundance of “light” food choices. You know, the “light” chips, the “sugar free” puddings, the “reduced fat” cheeses, the “fat free” ice creams.

Even though these foods are best left where they are (on supermarket shelves, not in supermarket carts), if you find the need to splurge on a less-than-wholesome snack, you’re better off getting the real thing and not its artificially sweetened counterpart. A Duke University Medical Center study reveals why.

Like most people, I’ve given these so-called “healthier” products a try. And I have to admit, for the most part, they do taste like the real thing. But I consistently found something missing once I’d finished: fullness. I wasn’t satisfied. I found myself craving more of the snack, which is precisely the wrong thing you want when the need to indulge arises.

But there’s a chemical reason for this, as the researchers from Duke University found when studying the brain chemistry of rats. And no, it’s not the obvious explanation: that “healthier”snack choices have fewer calories and fat grams than their ‘real thing’ counterparts.

As I’ve written in a previous article, one of the hormones in our bodies that control appetite is leptin. But there are several other functions in the body that play a role in appetite, including the neurotransmitter dopamine. Among many functions, dopamine plays a role in feelings of pleasure, and when foods stoke our internal pleasure meters, the brain has released large doses of that hormone.

But as the researchers discovered, the release of dopamine is hampered significantly when one eats phony foods flavored with phony ingredients, like the artificial sweetener sucralose.

The Duke researchers discovered this after feeding two groups of mice water, sometimes unflavored, sometimes flavored with sucrose and sometimes flavored with sucralose. One of the groups was blind to taste – they’d actually been bred to have no sense of taste (how they did that I have no idea). This is important to note because as the researchers observed, while the taste-blind mice had no preference for either water solution at first, over time, they opted for the sugar-sweetened water more often when forced to choose between unsweetened and sugar-sweetened water.

Observing this, in the next round of tests, they implanted the rats’ brains with sensors that were able to identify how the brain reacted to different flavors; specifically, how the receptors that release dopamine were affected. When the two groups of rats were given a choice between sucrose-sweetened water and sucralose-sweetened water (the artificial sweetener), the rats’ brain receptors released dopamine when tasting both sweeteners.

But the same could not be said for the taste-blind rats. For them, only when they tasted the sucrose-sweetened water was dopamine released. When tasting the sucralose-sweetened water, one of the receptors released zero dopamine.

As the researchers point out, this suggests that artificially sweetened foods provide little sustenance. While they may seem like they’re a “healthier” alternative, they often cause one to eat more so satiety can be achieved and pleasure can be experienced.

This should not be construed as an article advocating the purchase of sugar-saturated desserts. However, if one must indulge, it’s best to get the real thing; the fake thing provides little sustenance. The only thing it provides is a craving for more.