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Study: Artificial sweeteners toxic to digestive gut bacteria
- wattengard 8y agoI'm not a mouse...
- vezycash 8y ago>I'm not a mouse... Expanded: Animal studies are just a start. Human trials might get opposite results. E.g. The drug Indocid or Indocin is safe for human consumption but kills rats. It's a cheap rat killer. If rats were tested first, we'd assume they'll kill humans. The reverse applies as well.
- ceejayoz 8y agoYes, but because you take two decades to reach reproductive maturity, and tend to sue if subjected to a lifetime of confinement in a lab being experimented on, we start with the mouse studies.
- pieter_mj 8y agoCurrently a perfect diabetes, obesitas (and also cancer & alzheimer's) storm is brewing. My gut instinct (pun intended) tells me it mainly has dietary causes which are not limited to increased portions alone.
- vezycash 8y agoSome books I've read say increased portions are a symptom of something else. E.g. Inability to feel satisfied.
- bunderbunder 8y agoSo, tying it back to artificial sweeteners, there's a fair bit of research to suggest that consuming them causes you to feel more hungry.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoThe real question is, are they still preferable to sugar anyway given the lower caloric value? My experience is yes.
- com2kid 8y agoJust the taste something sweet spikes insulin levels[1], and as you said at least some artificial sweeteners don't cause fullness[2] (I am amused that is not the major finding there, heh). It makes sense, the body releases insulin in expectation of nutrition coming in, but no nutrition comes in, so the end result is feeling hungrier than before. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17510492 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17510492 [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21255472 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21255472
- nervousvarun 8y agoProcessed foods + sedentary lifestyles = perfect storm. Pretty obvious "something" happened in the 70s and we've been on this ride ever since: https://nchspressroom.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/obesity.gif https://nchspressroom.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/obesity.gi...
- unstuckdev 8y agoRealizing one 2 tablespoon serving of peanut butter was half a full meal was a wakeup call. It turns out 1/4 or less of a "serving" of most processed things works the same taste-wise and doesn't lead to insatiable hunger later.
- bb101 8y agoInterestingly, peanut butter is near the bottom of the scale for being insulinogenic (the food insulin index). That means it's less likely to be put away as fat according to The Personalized Diet by Drs Segal and Elinav [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1478918802 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1478918802
- unstuckdev 8y agoDoes this factor in the added sugar in most peanut butters? I can't find any without it around here.
- XorNot 8y agoSwitch to unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter. It's amazing - after 2 weeks I stopped noticing the difference. The amount of sugar in most peanut butter is absurd. Once you kick the sugar taste, oh wow do you realize its got a much more interesting and involved flavor.
- Dirlewanger 8y agoIt probably does. Colloquially when one says peanut butter, people think of Jiff, which can be best described as a disgusting peanut-flavored spread product. Go with natural peanut butter (i.e. where the only ingredient is peanuts and it must be stirred) and you're all good.
- datavirtue 8y agoAlready been proven. The problem now is getting the government to change thier food recommendations based on the findings. The fight has been going on since the 1970s. We are talking about a fundamental change to society here.
- oxymoran 8y agoPerhaps this an avenue towards a new type of antibiotic?
- WhiteSage 8y agoThe title is slightly misleading. The study is only about neotame, and not artificial sweeteners in general. EDIT: Nevermind, only one article was linked. Thank you for linking the rest below.
- ceejayoz 8y agoHuh? The second paragraph says "six common artificial sweeteners", and the third says: > Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore tested the toxicity of aspartame, sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame, and acesulfame potassium-k. They observed that when exposed to only 1 milligram per milliliter of the artificial sweeteners, the bacteria found in the digestive system became toxic.
- contingencies 8y agoIt links to two studies. Neotame (2018-02-09) @ https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367 https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367 Sweeteners (2018-09-25) @ https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454 https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Illniyar 8y agoThe link in the article is to the wrong research, it seems. The correct research is this: https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454 https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454
- raisedbyninjas 8y agoThere are only 12 milligrams of sucralose in a packet of Splenda. So the toxic levels found in mice had the same concentration as an 8 oz. cup of coffee with 16 packets of Splenda.
- searine 8y agoExactly. Most of that white powder in a sugar packet is dextrose filler.
- unstuckdev 8y agoHow is dextrose in a sugar packet filler? That makes no sense to me. Maybe it's just a confusion of terms.
- ceejayoz 8y agoMaybe they meant cellulose?
- logfromblammo 8y agoCellulose is used as an anti-caking/anti-clumping additive. It doesn't add bulk like the puffed up dextrose or maltodextrin does.
- ceejayoz 8y agoIt's used as a filler in pre-grated "Parmesan" cheese. https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/article/parmesan-wood-pulp-cellulose https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/ar...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoI believe parent meant a packet of Splenda, not actual sugar. However, it would not be surprising if packets of "sugar" actually contained dextrose as a bulking agent.
- KingMachiavelli 8y agoThe article is a bit confusing in that they refer to two separate studies. Both of the studies are open access (Neotame) https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367 https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367 (6 sweeteners) https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454 https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454 Also there seems to be a typo in the article: > ...the bacteria found in the digestive system became toxic. I don't think they mean the bacteria themselves became toxic.
- qwerty456127 8y agoThe article doesn't say which sweeteners did they study and this is a very bad style. Fortunately it links to an article on EurekAlert which in its turn links to the actual scientific paper (doi.org/10.3390/molecules23102454). It says aspartame, sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame and acesulfame potassium-k (ace-k) (BTW at least saccharine and ace-k are already known to be carcinogenic AFAIK) were tested against Escherichia Coli (I would rather be interested in testing them against Lactobacillaceae). Lactulose is a great prebiotic (not widely known infortunately) very good for gut bacteria (AFAIK), has geroprotective properties, is a mild osmotic laxative, has zero calories, doesn't affect blood sugar/insulin and tastes great. I use it instead of maple syrup. As far as I also know erythritol (looks, feels and cooks almost exactly like sugar) and palatinose (same, but has calories yet doesn't kick insulin and doesn't feed mouth bacteria so is safe for teeth) are good for gut bacteria too. We could also mention inulin (which is a well-known prebiotic very beneficial for gut microbiome) but it's sweetness is weaker.
- haisch 8y agoAccording to research from 1985 Xylitol has to been shown to shift the gut microbiome population from gram negative to gram positive bacteria. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4076932 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4076932
- jwbwater 8y agoConsuming too much xylitol gives me a stomach ache. I tried adding it to water for dental health on multiple occasions and got a stomach ache each time.
- haisch 8y agoYeah you don't want to consume a lot of it without easing into it. I have been using it for only about a week now and use it as a mouth wash after each meal and my teeth have gotten noticeably whiter. You will get diarrhea if you don't ease into consuming it because it is increasing the production of butyrate which is the mucus that lines yours intestines. If it is also killing off gram negative bacteria as studies claim, you may have some stomach irritability as those bacteria die off initially. I'm surprised xylitol isn't more ubiquitous given the research surrounding it.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoIt looks like the study confirms what we already knew. It would be more interesting to see what happens with what are considered more healthy alternatives, such as xylitol or erythritol. They seem to be "mostly fine", but more research would be very beneficial given that people use them more and more.
- dayvid 8y agoYou can thank former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld for allowing Aspartame to remain FDA approved despite scientific research concerns: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/nzpbkx/the-story-of-how-fake-sugar-got-approved-is-scary-as-hell https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/nzpbkx/the-story-of-how...
- spadros 8y agoMeh, this study is misleading. They didn't test if any other foods had the same effect. So sure, sweeteners might have a detrimental effect by this biomarker. But they didn't check if anything we'd consider healthy, like broccoli or onions, have similar effects. This is like saying "smoking increases your change of a heart attack 10X after one puff!" without noting "...but having sex increases it 7X and drinking a can of coke increases it 5X".
- emodendroket 8y agoPutting that aside, they also give you horrible gas.
- CannisterFlux 8y agoSeems like everything has artificial sweeteners nowadays. It's a trend that I noticed only in the last couple of years. And not just fizzy drinks like Sprite or Pepsi - which have sugar and sweetener! - but breakfast cereals, yoghurts, ketchup-like sauces... all have "no added sugar" on the package, you dig a bit deeper and they are full of sweeteners. Chewing gum and other "healthy sweet" products like that have used sweetener for years, and have always had a warning not to take too much, or it'll give you the shits. Clearly bad for your gut or you wouldn't be getting these side effects. Yet here we are, with sweeteners everywhere and getting more pervasive. I just try to avoid sugar and sweeteners as much as possible. Seems like half the things I add in "My Fitness Pal" have a little orange warning about something :(
- sevensor 8y ago> or it'll give you the shits I believe that's a common side effect of sugar alcohols like xylitol.
- DanBC 8y ago> Clearly bad for your gut or you wouldn't be getting these side effects. That's not how that works. Ifyou eat too much fruit the sugar in that can cause a laxative effect,and the mecahnism is the same as with suga alcohols. The undigested sugar causes osmosis, which floods the gut with water, which causes diarrhea.
- atomical 8y agoThere have been studies done where patients were given lots of fruit and it did not cause a laxative effect. https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/02/23/can-you-eat-too-much-fruit/ https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/02/23/can-you-eat-too-much-f... > Seventeen people were made to eat 20 servings a day of fruit. Despite the extraordinarily high fructose content of this diet, presumably about 200 g/d—eight cans of soda worth, the investigators reported no adverse effects (and possible benefit actually) for body weight, blood pressure, and insulin and lipid levels after three to six months.
- 8y ago
- biomcgary 8y agoThe underlying research article (https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454 https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454) is set up as a "no-fail" experiment since it infers toxicity with the slightest change (inhibition or induction) in a very sensitive reporter (luciferase). They are NOT measuring change in growth rate of the bacterial cells, the traditional measure of toxicity (aka IC, or inhibitory concentration). The study has positive and negative controls, but this assay is poorly controlled relative to how it is being interpreted (impact of artificial sweeteners on human gut microbiome). The only way to accurately calibrate this novel assay for relevance to human health is to expose the bacteria to a wide range of natural foods (e.g., avocado, spinach, berries, honey, etc) and show that it does not return a positive result. If nearly everything is toxic, the assay is not useful. However, if most natural foods have no toxicity signal, then the assay has genuine value.
- mohaine 8y agoI've always found any of these studies that treat artificial sweeteners as a single group very suspect. 1) The only thing the different types of Artificial Sweeteners have in common is a high sweetness value per volume (2k-4k time more sweet than sugar is common). Other than that they are different chemicals so it seems strange to treat them a single group. Sure a few of them might have issues but it seems silly to say they all have the same single issue. Really a red flag for who funded the study. 2) Due to the very high sweetness levels compared to sugar, even if the artificial sweetener is many times worse than sugar per volume, it is still safer due to only 1/2k being actually being used.
- jjoonathan 8y agoI can buy the mechanism of high sweetness/vol mucking with satiety or insulin heuristics. My problem with these studies is that the ones promoted by the media overwhelmingly tend to have "cheated" to obtain positive results -- they claim to have found a link between artificial sweetners and cancer/diabetes/whatever but show the usual signs of severe significance hacking when I skim the paper. My own belief heuristics lead me to the tentative conclusion that effect size is therefore very small.
- 8y ago
- thegabez 8y agoAnecdotally I've noticed when I chew large amounts of artificially sweetened gum (mentos pure fresh) throughout the day, I will have restless legs throughout the night.
- cheeko1234 8y agoTop comment at r/science: Ordinary table salt and most other essential non-organic mineral naturally found in healthy foods, are toxic in increasing doses to bacteria. As a biochemist I'd be willing to bet that those necessary minerals in the human diet would stress the hell out of these bacteria in increasing doses also. The bacteria in this paper do NOT show growth inhibition with these artificial sweeteners in the doses used. It's a pretty huge jump in scientific presumption - from a change in fluorescence in a contrived sub-inhibitory bacterial "stress" assay, to the authors statement of "we may speculate that the response observed in our study may be relevant to gut microbiome and thus may influence human health". (statements in italics not tested by authors) So doubt their basic premise has any validity. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9ki9nw/scientists_report_many_artificial_sweeteners/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9ki9nw/scientists_... Not only that, they were only using a fluorescing E. coli as a proxy for the incredibly diverse gut microbiota. For it to have any real bearing on human health, they'd need to do at least an animal model study and show a difference in 16s rRNA quantitation and/or sequencing for relative abundances of different species. But I sympathize with the need to make your study sound significant and worth doing....
- SeanFerree 8y agoI'm not a fan of artificial sweeteners since there is always so much bad news about them. I still drink them from time to time though
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amelius 8y agoWhen will we have artificial fat?
- Bartweiss 8y agoOh man, that is a tough order. Sugar has the convenient trait of being essentially a flavor, so all that's needed is to trick chemical receptors on the tongue with something that's nontoxic and either not bioavailable or very high intensity relative to sucrose. Fat ends up affecting flavor, mouthfeel, and food traits (e.g. water retention, bulk) - and a lot of those roles are inherently tied to fat volume. Safe, bio-unavailable fats already exist, more or less, in the form of fatty alcohols. They can cause minor irritation to the liver, but nonlinear long-chain fatty acids are safe enough that we already use them in food as emulsifiers. Wax esters, which bind fatty alcohols to fatty acids (i.e. normal fats), are also poorly digested and extremely fat-like. Escolar and oilfish are notable as fatty fish with wax esters making up almost all of the fat. Unfortunately, that 'volume' issue now comes home to roost. Wax esters in low doses (e.g. orange roughy) are fine, but in high doses (e.g. escolar), they tend to cause stomach pain and bowel issues - not because they're toxic, but because they simply aren't digested. Other replacement fats like Olestra (once FDA approved as a fat substitute) have the same problem: they simply come out in the same form they went in. To replace a significant portion of our "fat experience" with artificial fat means we need something which is similar in the mouth, low calorie and cholesterol, but also digestible. The best options we've found are either variant fats with lower absorption and calorie density, or other-macronutrient substances which serve only some of the same roles, like pectin or whey. Those, again, can lower cholesterol but can't do much better than half the calorie density of fat. I'm not sure what artificial fat on the level of artificial sugar would mean. It would, I suppose, have to be something which is digested sufficiently to excrete without deriving energy or other components like cholesterol. And in an Algernon Argument sort of way, we probably shouldn't expect to find the body digesting very many compounds it derives no benefit from, so "somewhat better" is probably all we can hope for.
- andy_ppp 8y agoIt would be interesting to see some kind of health warning with stats or articles, including replication, funding sources, invitro/animal/human studies etc. I just cannot trust even the most basic science announcements on mainstream media as things stand. It is simply more important that it generates clicks than it advanced people’s understanding these days.
- apeace 8y agoOff-topic, here is one of my favorite HN comments ever, about artificial sweeteners: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566
- milin 8y agoReading this while enjoying my diet coke was a bad idea.
- jwbwater 8y agoI feel you. I was drinking a coke at dinner with a friend who started talking about how sugar suppresses the immune system. The coke just didn't taste the same after that.
- ackfoo 8y agoI am concerned by the absence of a dose-response until above a threshold concentration for all substances tested. Perhaps osmotic effects, displacement, and chemical competition for receptors, all of which may be in-vitro effects, may explain the curves. Is the threshold relevant to in-vivo concentrations? No idea. The reason toxicity is expressed as an LD50 is to account for the dose-response of toxins. If toxins behaved as purported in this experiment, we could use a simple concentration number instead: no effect, no effect, no effect, dead. Also, it looks like all the substances that showed toxic induction did so around the same concentration. Very suspicious for chemically disparate substances with, presumably, different mechanisms of action. “How can we all have died at the same time? ...(thinks)...The salmon mousse!”
- nikkwong 8y agoI was big on artificial sweeteners (I refuse to eat any sugar), mainly erythritol and monkfruit, but some science(1) says that just their taste profile can trick your body into thinking it's consuming a real sugar with the associated glucose/insulin response and this could be one reason as to why non-nutritive sweeteners can throw your blood and insulin response profiles out of whack, which may be a reason as to why individuals who consume artificial sweeteners suffer the same maladies as those who consume high levels of sugar. If the science on this issue becomes conclusively affirmative, then it's sort of the nail in the coffin for artificial sweeteners, because it doesn't matter what the compositional makeup of the sweetener is, it's our own bodies own responses to the taste/smell that are giving us the ill effects. I would definitely like to be dissuaded as to believing this is not the case, though, as it's caused my to ignore my sweet tooth for far too long! :) For those who are interested in and/or consume artificial sweeteners, I think this link is definitely worth a read: [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4661066/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4661066/
- clumsysmurf 8y agoAnyone know how gut bacteria respond to Stevia?
- dual_basis 8y agoIt's pretty clear to me that there is significant bias in the premise. Why, specifically, should it be artificial sweeteners that are toxic to gut bacteria? Irony is not a scientific motivation, it is a journalistic motivation. What makes artificial sweeteners more likely to be toxic to gut bacteria than, say, food coloring, preservatives, or (dare I say it) natural herbs and spices?