West Lafayette, IN -- Here's bad news for those who are watching their waistlines: Diet drinks may actually make you more likely to overeat.

According to researchers at Purdue University, artificial sweeteners may disrupt the body's ability to count calories.

In Terry Davidson's and Susan Swithers' study, rats who drank both glucose-sweetened and artificially-sweetened drinks ate more rat chow than rodents which didn't consume diet drinks.

Swithers says the rats who drank the zero-calorie sweet drinks lost the ability to judge whether sweet food had calories or not -- which led them to overeat.

She says this same ability may be found in humans, although she has yet to conduct lab tests on people.

In a related study, researchers found that rats given a liquid diet also ate more than rats given the same diet in semi-solid form -- which suggests consuming a 64-oz soda may be worse for your diet than eating the same amount of calories as solid food.

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