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This just in: sugar substitutes do not actually help people lose weight. What a surprise. Here's what helps people lose weight - actually eating less food.

Watching people consume mass quantities of food and then chasing it down with a Diet Coke isn't going to help you lose weight. Throwing in a packet of Splenda or Sweet n'Low isn't going to make that double fudge brownie with ice cream disappear off your thighs or midsection any quicker. If anything, this study suggests that the artificial sweeteners actually increase weight control problems.

What they mean is that like Pavlov's dog, trained to salivate at the sound of a bell, animals are similarly trained to anticipate lots of calories when they taste something sweet — in nature, sweet foods are usually loaded with calories. When an animal eats a saccharin-flavored food with no calories, however — disrupting the sweetness and calorie link — the animal tends to eat more and gain more weight, the new study shows. The study was even able to document at the physiological level that animals given artificial sweeteners responded differently to their food than those eating high-calorie sweetened foods. The sugar-fed rats, for example, showed the expected uptick in core body temperature at mealtime, corresponding to their anticipation of a bolus of calories that they would need to start burning off — a sort of metabolic revving of the energy engines. The saccharin-fed animals, on the other hand, showed no such rise in temperature. "The animals that had the artificial sweetener appear to have a different anticipatory response," says Susan Swithers, a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University and a co-author of the study. "They don't anticipate as many calories arriving." The net result is a more sluggish metabolism that stores, rather than burns, incoming excess calories.

Exercise and diet go hand in hand. The sooner that more people realize this and that sugar substitutes aren't a panacea for their weight issues, the better off those people will be. If this study and others like it are correct, the entire diet food industry based on artificial sweeteners is actually making the problem worse for millions of Americans who are struggling with their weight.