Splenda makes you fat, or so says reports out of the UK.

Studies found that rats given Splenda were fatter than rats not given the sweetener. And that's not all -- they also had less beneficial bacteria in their guts. Of course,we're talking rats -- obviously humans are different. And, as I previously told you, apparently the study was funded by the sugar industry, which means you might want to question the motives behind this whole 'splenda makes you fat' claim.

Don't trust Splenda? Here's a quick list of what it's in:

• Some diet sodas
• Many low-carb or sugar-free chocolate bars and candies
• Diet Snapple Iced Tea
• Reebok Fitness Water
• Juicy Fruit gum
• Kids Trident sugar-free gum
  

You know what I'm going to say -- everything in moderation, be it Splenda, sugar or whatever. But personally, I'd choose regular sugar over artificial sweeteners any day, unless I had a medical condition like diabetes. What about you?

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If you recall, not very long ago there was a great deal of fervor over a report linking diet soda to an increased risk of obesity. The story appeared everywhere; on the AOL homepage, in the New York Times, and yes, here on That's Fit. I'll admit, at first I was a bit skeptical; to me it seemed more like an issue of correlation than causality. At the time, there really wasn't any explanation for the statistically significant relationship between diet soda and obesity rates -- all that was known is that there was clearly some sort of link.

Since then, a number of studies have produced information to explain how and why there may be validity to this connection. Most recently, a Purdue University study published in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience revealed that rats that consumed yogurt sweetened with an artificial sweetener gained 20 percent more weight over time than rats fed yogurt sweetened with natural sugar.

Evidently, the artificial sweetener caused the body to falsely believe that it needed to increase metabolism to digest more calories than were actually contained in the yogurt. Then, over time, when the rats were fed sweet food that was also high in calories, they tended to overeat in order to compensate for what their body mistakenly perceived to be an insufficient amount of calories.

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