Why prefer something that you know is definitely bad for you over something that maybe is but more likely benign?
For instance, they disrupt your metabolism, so equivalently sweet amounts of sweeteners cause more weight gain than sugar. (Due to increased hunger vs. eating nothing, decreased metabolism and decreased calorie burn.)
The study in the article isn’t surprising at all. Links between nutrisweet and migraine headaches have been well understood for a long time. It’s not surprising other similar chemicals have similar negative side effects.
There’s no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners (other than diabetes, but even then, gaining weight from the sweeteners is a problem if the diabetes is weight related.)
The most credible meta analyses (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240046429) only show positive or null effects compared to equivalent sugar amounts.
Sugar is still the cultural default; artificial sweeteners are something you explicitly choose due to health concerns (worried about being or becoming diabetic, or overweight, or worried about sugar being unhealthy in general, or about the mood/motivation angle, etc.).
I imagine becoming overweight itself is linked to anxiety both ways, as eating or snacking is a common reaction to stress, a way to relieve it in the moment.
If only. Check the ingredients (usually near the bottom) of some energy drinks some time. Monster, NOS, AMP, half of the Rockstar flavors, Bang, and so on will add sucralose to the normal versions with sugar or HFCS in them. It's hard to find one without artificial sweeteners. This is especially crazy as Monster already has their sugar-free (Ultra?) line. They're forcing normal people to consume sucralose, and it's awful. Luckily Red Bull seems fine for now (Blueberry flavor is really good). Guru in its original flavor only also has no sucralose, but I think all the other flavors have it. I first noticed this trend one of the times they brought back Mtn Dew Game Fuel and it tasted disgusting. Now I'm scared of any new drink, or that they'll ruin one I like.
Also, I think water is fine, caffeine pills are fine, I know some people are against energy drinks, but I don't think that's a reason to ruin them (preempting replies saying not to drink them at all). I've been drinking black coffee all week but I still have some Blueberry Red Bull in my fridge for when I feel like it.
(Full disclosure: I consider red bull very high risk of being unhealthy, considering the stuff they put in, the artificial flavours, etc. – sucralose is a mere detail to me)
Ultimately, sweeteners won me over, and I've been "on" them for the past 12 years. For me it's a simple matter: I dislike pure water, and have been drinking black tea instead ever since I was a single-digit aged kid - but I also can't stand unsweetened tea. Sweeteners save me from ingesting stupid amounts of sugar through drinking some 10 mugs of tea every day, as I used to long ago.
What? No they haven't. This is just straight-up misinformation.
Aspartame is completely safe to consume. It's not carcinogenic, it doesn't mess up your metabolism, it doesn't do anything. At worst, it can cause some people stomach upset in large quantities.
We can't just lie and make things up because they sound intuitively true. Zero-calorie sweeteners sound too good to be true, sure. That doesn't mean they actually are, that's not science.
> There’s no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners (other than diabetes, but even then, gaining weight from the sweeteners is a problem if the diabetes is weight related.)
"There's no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners" -> proceeds to list valid reasons.
Yes, people use these for weight control because they're very effective and safe. Also: it's impossible to gain weight from artificial sweeteners like Aspartame. There's no calories in them, what would make you gain weight?
The possible artificial sweetener issues implied by the article ("may be poison") are ultra scary.
40% of the U.S. is overweight, 11% are diabetic, etc etc. There is no such magnitude of a problem due to erythritol or artificial sweeteners.
If "too many calories" were easy to solve we would not have an epidemic of it.
Also, you forget that sweeteners still cause an insulin release and some research shows that their effect on metabolism might be even worse than sugar itself because, being zero calories, they do not contribute to the sense of “caloric satiety,” so for the same volume of food your body has released more insulin.
It’s convenient for companies to claim sweeteners are safe and sugar is the devil, but consumers should take such a claim with a grain of salt. There is no silver bullet, and dietary sciences is a field of bad science and enormous commercial incentives to lie. A good rule of thumb is whatever we have consumed for thousands of years is likely not that bad. Sugar in quantities should be avoided, but elsewhere you have claimed that it is bad for you and I have to disagree with such hyperbole, compared to something we’ve eaten for less than 50 years created by food lobbies.
Now, implementing this is hard or maybe impossible for many individuals, I'm not denying this. The solution is simple, but for some it is not easy to implement.
It’s just that some people have mental addictions or whatever problems that makes them want to overeat or not exercise enough. But the solution itself is simple and straightforward.
This happens with sugary drinks, but also with solid food, such as cake.
Sure, once you see your weight go up, you can adjust. But adjusting is difficult, and I think this is a contributing factor to the weight problems people have.
From Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories:
> “To attribute obesity to ‘overeating,’” as the Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer suggested back in 1968, “is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to ‘overdrinking.’”
Obesity etc are hormonal issues. It is not simple calorie-in, calorie-out math. I have been on a diet, off-and-on, for 15 years, and I can notice craving for carbs increase after "slipping/cheating" by consuming sugary food. While I generally manage to avoid reaching for snacks, I can only imagine how people can struggle with this, more so when others around them are stuffing themselves with food rich in sugar.
- If I consume more than 2,300 kcal per day, I gain measurable weight in weeks.
- If I consume less than 2,100 kcal per day, I lose measurable weight in weeks.
- Physical activity has little effect on my weight change.
- Age has little effect on my weight change.
- When losing weight, I must work out to retain strength. Moving around an extra 10 kg takes strength that is lost when the weight is lost.
In my case, any hormonal effects are secondary to the above. I've changed what I eat over the years and my weight didn't change if I consumed the same kcals. There are likely subtleties I am missing, but eating less works for me. YMMV
I sometimes binge on cheese and nuts or peanut butter when I'm not at my best, but even when I do this for weeks, and I'm talking an extra 2000 calories in a day which is easy with those things, I haven't gained weight (fat). I don't feel as good and I don't recommend it, but I think it's safer than eating sugar if one is going to binge. I had a couple years 10 years ago where I ate sweet things most days and did gain noticeable weight (fat). So it's not like I'm genetically not going to gain weight either.
As an aside, physical activity might not affect weight change as much but it will affect the fat/muscle ratio.
The extra 200 calories would be more of the same, just bigger portions. I record everything by weight when eating at home, and have a good feel for calories per unit weight, but double check often. Cheeses are about 100 cals per oz, breads or snacks with little fat (pretzels) are 80-100 cals per oz, nuts are dangerously calorific at 160-180 cal per oz. Peanut butter is the same. I eat nearly everything, both good and bad for me, but keep track of calories and it's been working for me. I do eat ice cream occasionally, with full awareness of how much. My calorie limit is a target, but I enjoy life. The only thing I've eliminated completely is alcohol.
I know of diabetics who cannot give up on sugary treats with full knowledge of the consequences of their behavior, people who have seen others in the family lose eyes, limbs, kidneys and life to the disease. Not a single one of them will consume a block of cheese or butter if one were to set these in front of them. Or a plate of diced carrots or cucumbers. It is always the chocolates and chips and the cookies and the ice cream and the biscuits.
Over the last two decades, I have been 128 kg at my peak. I have also been 93 kg. I have noticed that carbs absolutely wreck my ability to maintain weight. You lose the will to say no to food.
I am in India. Festivals start in September and continue for the next few months. It is an unending caravan of carb-heavy food. I can very easily put on 10 kg in those months. 70K excess calories in 2-3 months is not a lot. This does not happen with high fat food, because you cannot eat those in large quantities. They have high satiety value.
> Physical activity has little effect on my weight change
The human body is insanely adaptive. The natural impulse, I believe, is to conserve energy. For different people, it will respond to continuous over- and under-eating as well as over- and under-exertion in different ways.
People should do what works for them.
> Physical activity has little effect on my weight change.
Those two statements appear to be contradictory?
I've switched to the keto diet for other health reasons --I never had any weight issues, and my weight didn't change-- but I never feel as hungry as I used to. But eat a square of chocolate and the hunger comes back.
Let me consume it everyday.
Radium, too was deemed safe to suck on. Thalidomide, perfectly safe. Hormone replacement therapy, perfectly safe...
The safety of these (Thalidomide, HRT) were also backed by studies.
I find safety studies very suspect unless there's years of experience, especially if there is money to be made by someone.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it -- Upton Sinclair
The few times I've looked in depth at the studies about the safety of a particular thing, I have found that each study has at least one obvious major flaw that makes the study not necessarily support the conclusion. You could have 10 such studies or 100 and say that lots of studies show that X is safe or Y is dangerous, and the conclusion could be wrong.
This especially common when there's a financial incentive for the people doing or controlling the study to get the result they want, which there usually is. Or for studies that don't get the desired result to not be published.
Such as?
Some of the same scientists who were paid off by the tobacco industry to lie to the public about the safety of cigarettes are now working for the food industry to convince the public that food additives are safe.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...
More skepticism than usual seems reasonable.
Small as in "the alternatives are most likely worse" or as in "you are consuming already a dozen other things that are known to be more problematic by an order of magnitude and you should focus on them instead".
The unsafe reputation came from a flawed study of far older, women.
IMHO the inventors should win the Nobel Peace Prize.
"Years of experience" means an increasingly larger population has been subject to use of the compound. It may take 10's of millions of exposures for the problems to become clear enough to elicit action.
A surprising number of drugs (and food additives) have been used for decades before their adverse effects were recognized and the offenders removed from the market.
We should regard initial or early claims of safety as preliminary statements. Indeed skepticism is warranted. Ongoing monitoring/reevaluation is necessary. Certainly utmost caution is needed before allowing products to be widely used.
Most safety studies are paid for by entities that will profit if the study shows the thing to be safe. It's important to look at incentives.
This is also a very different problem to solve. Especially in the face of regulatory capture.
An alternative model, where the owner/proposer owns complete liability of dangers and damages proved in the future, is also not fully satisfactory.
I think some shared ownership of liability is the best solution but no business will touch it.
Privatisation of profit socialization of liability is where things are at.
> I think you are right and the Upton Sinclair quote might have cut too close to home.
I think you might be taking the wrong lesson from GP. While they were agreeing with you on the substance, they were pointing out that your way of presenting your point was undercutting your message.
Your response comes off as roughly, "Yeah, the truth hurts," which continues that tonal problem GP was talking about.
No it is not. The overwhelming quantites are bad. But this applies to almost any food.
To a starving child in a impoverished nation? Sugar would be great.
Context is important.
If your blood sugar is low, then eating/drinking stuff with a high glycemic index can be very good for you. For instance after heavy exercising.
You might think it is obvious, but people like simplistic things, so "sugar is bad for you, mmkay" is what most people believe nowadays rather than having a basic understanding of such fairly simple aspects of nutrition.
It’s just bad in general. Yes, there are corner case, like athletes, where in moderate quantities it is useful.
There is definitely a healthy/beneficial/useful dosage of sugar. Especially while exercising, sugar is not stored and is used as litteral fuel by the body.
There aren't any really long term studies of it to show what other effects it might have, though.
I think people get hung up on finding sugar substitutes when the root is eating sweet things constantly. You don't have to eat and drink sweet all the time. Many modern diets (not just n. Amer) are totally overindexed on sweetness.
Drink water, eat good foods, enjoy a bit of jam on your toast or whatever here and there and get lots of exercise and you'll be fine. You don't need aspartame and xylitol and stevia to be healthy.
One issue is that if you're buying drinks there are very few intermediate options. I don't mind a little sugar but if I'm traveling and stop at a store the drink options are usually 97% super sweet (artificial or otherwise) and 3% zero sweetness, with nothing in between.
Doesn't immediately taste horrific like Stevia.... I'm glad the fashion for shoving that in everything has passed.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsn3.2904
Oh also it’s super lethal for dogs.
I only chew gum if it has xylitol in it.
Spent the rest of the day on the toilet.
Back when I was athletic, I definitely had a problem putting weight on rather than taking it off.
This is not a reason to avoid it, but to be very careful when shopping and to buy only something that is not adulterated with anything, for instance pure whey protein concentrate or isolate (when produced correctly, those are made by just filtering the whey, without adding anything, though even some of the companies that do not add sweeteners still add lecithin as emulsifier and an anti-caking agent, to be able to market the powder as "instant"; however these additives are far more benign and in far smaller quantities than sweeteners and fragrances).
"Human cerebral microvascular endothelial cells were cultured and exposed to an amount of erythritol equivalent to consuming a typical beverage. Experimental conditions included five biological replicates per group."
So it needs to cross the blood-brain barrier. From the research paper: "Moreover, it is important to note that erythritol does cross the blood brain barrier and interact with the cerebrovasculature". Unclear what percentage this is.
Are we at that point yet?
AFAICT aspartame seems to be pretty safe and well-researched, and the IARC listing it as "possibly carcinogenic" itself seems to be controversial. In that category it is listed along side such things as Aloe Vera, Carpentry, Low-frequency magnetic fields, Traditional asian pickled vegetables, Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields and Gingko Biloba extract...
Unfortunately, the receptors for sweetness do not exist for the sole purpose of giving pleasure to the brain.
They are also used to signal to various organs to prepare for an influx of carbohydrates. When the signal is frequently present, but then the expected carbohydrates do not come, then this is likely to perturb some control functions of the body, like in the fable about the boy who cried wolf.
This also holds for non-artificial sweetener, or in fact any substance entering our body.
Disturbing a process expecting a large influx of carbohydrates vs. disturbing the body with an actual high influx of carbohydrates, disturbing the body by neither consuming nor triggering carbohydrate processes, ...
Drinking bitter fluids - say, coffee - trigger early toxicity warnings that prepare your body for emergency oral bowel evacuation, as "bitter" is the taste of various substances evolution associated with food poisoning. What other mechanisms might that trigger? That's a lot of "crying wolf" for many people.
Eating food in order to have energy to do things is not "disturbing". The parent was talking about telling your body many times a day that its going to get carbohydrates that it doesn't need (and is not going to receive in the case of sweeteners) is the problem.
It most certainly is. It disrupts several processes, requires significant energy and resource expenditure, spikes various hormones that may or may not be able to develop intolerances. Significant impact to the gut, pancreas, brain (e.g., reward systems).
Not all of the effects are as high profile as full on diabetes, but its most certainly very disruptive.
Even the most healthy things are disruptive and stressful. Exercise is also incredibly disruptive, causing significant continuous injury and a panic-like reaction trying to keep your body from falling apart at the seams den eject your heart through the nearest chest opening.
Living is the act of balancing on a knife's edge with every force in nature trying to knock you over. You live not because of nature, but in spite of it.
On the other hand, for the sweet taste we know that receptors exist not only in the mouth, but also in the intestine, where also the starch from the food would be already digested into glucose or maltose, so it would be sensed as sweet, and where the sweetness receptors do not cause any conscious sensation, so they must have another purpose.
The role of the sweetness receptors from the intestine is not known yet, because short-term studies could not determine it. However, they must have some effects, though those might appear only after longer times of periodic stimulation.
That would not explain why the stomach delays opening in response to bitter in the mouth, similar to preparing for protein digestion on glutamate detection.
But of course, we don't exactly have a spec sheet to work with here, so all we can do is theorize on why a particular trait might have evolved...
"...findings indicate that these food additives, consumed daily by millions of people and present in thousands of foods and beverages, should not be considered a healthy and safe alternative to sugar..."
Also, artificial sweeteners might not help with obesity: "Long-term aspartame and saccharin intakes are related to greater volumes of visceral, intermuscular, and subcutaneous adipose tissue: the CARDIA study" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-023-01336-y
But reading this bit -
"Compared with non-consumers, higher consumers (unadjusted comparisons) tended to be younger, have a higher body mass index, were more likely to smoke, be less physically active, and to follow a weight loss diet; they had lower total energy intake, and lower alcohol, lipid (saturated and polyunsaturated), fibre, carbohydrate, fruit and vegetable intakes, and higher intakes of sodium, red and processed meat, dairy products, and beverages with no added sugar"
I'm not sure how much we can say this is a smoking gun, and how much we can say people who are less healthy and have worse outcomes are also using more sweeteners. In fact the authors note this in weaknesses -
"Additionally, reverse causality could lead to higher artificially sweetened food and beverage consumption among participants who were overweight or obese, and already had poorer cardiovascular health at baseline before CVD diagnosis. However, this factor probably does not entirely explain the observed associations because we excluded CVD events occurring during the first two years of follow-up and we also tested models adjusted for baseline body mass index, weight loss diet, and weight change during follow-up, which did not substantially change the results."
So it seems that even though they have tried to control for that, they can't eliminate it, so I wouldn't personally draw any strong conclusions.
For the record, I don't consume particularly much of any artificial sweetener, though I am fond of the occasional diet coke.
Forest for the trees.
It's better to teach people that there is no free lunch, and they should take care about the calories they are consuming, even if that imply reduce frequency of sweet foods, than sugar coating an equally bad alternative to make it sound like it's healthier.
2. "no free lunch" is a phrase we need to retire forever. Yes, there is free lunch, we do it all the time. That's why infant mortality was 50% and now it's 1 in 1000. That's just called progress, we make things better all the time. That's kind of what humans do.
I've known people who have diabetes eating industrial potato chips telling me they stay away from butter and eggs and red meat because of the cholesterol and saturated fat. It's backwards.
These are natural parts of real food that have been eaten in significant quantities by humans for many tens of thousands of years.
I haven't gone as thoroughly into the literature on saturated fat but I don't think I need to. The few studies I've looked at had basic obvious flaws. Saturated fat made up a big part of people's diets in many regions, long before the modern epidemics of diabetes and heart disease. Personally I've been "gorging" on it for ten years now and am in excellent health.
I did look at many of the papers used to say sodium is bad and found that that is not a valid conclusion from those papers. Of course don't overdo salt but the problem shown by most of the studies is probably with processed food which has a lot of sodium, not the sodium itself.
Yes there is: diets high in saturated fats cause heart disease in the long term. There's a lot of meta-analysis on this, it's very much established.
> Saturated fat made up a big part of people's diets in many regions, long before the modern epidemics of diabetes and heart disease.
No, no they don't. This is a common misconception.
High saturated fats come from farmed meat, which is a fairly new phenomenon. Game meat is actually typically very low in saturated fat, and high in unsaturated fat.
In addition, high meat consumption is a new thing. Past 100 years only. Pre-historic humans were hunter-gathers, but almost all their diet was carbohydrates. They ate upwards of 100 grams of fiber a day and little to no meat, because meat is quite hard to get. Even after that meat consumption remained low, up until the past hundred years where wealth and farming allowed high meat consumption.
But, even today, you might be shocked to know that most humans globally do not eat a diet high in meat. It's only the west.
If it were a case of "calories in, calories out", all the experiments down by food technicians to understand what is happening in the brain when you consume certain flavors (they were literally getting people to taste soda in an MRI scanner decades ago), would not be an efficient use of time and the food industry would collapse.
If you eat 2000 kCals of lettuce, your body is going to do very, very different things to eating 2000 kCals of potato fries, including how it stores or consumes energy in that moment. Importantly, what your body does is likely going to be very different to what my body does. 10% of the population can stay slim while over-eating crap, because they are genetically lucky. A %age of the population will struggle to stay at a healthy BMI even if they eat mostly salads and fruits.
This isn't radical new age voodoo: the best science available today tells us the calories in/out model isn't anywhere near nuanced enough to help educate people on eating healthily and managing their weight.
Tim Spector has written some material on this, and I've been reading Camilla Stokholm's book recently. It's all quite interesting, and very different to what I was taught when growing up.
I'd also do some digging on ultra-processed foods - it might stop you thinking overweight people are just doing it to themselves. They're not.
I don't really think so. The only meaningful difference regarding the content of macronutrients is right at the start: you would have to eat about 20kg of lettuce to get there, which would overload your digestive system several times over.
If you hypothetically somehow managed to bypass this small issue, the main difference would be low fat content of lettuce compared to the fries. Bud the body can adapt to that.
It’s like saying people who want to stay awake when they are tired should just keep their eyes open.
> Human cerebral cells were cultured and treated with 6 mM of erythritol, equivalent to a typical amount of erythritol [30g] in an artificially sweetened beverage, for 3 hr.
the cells were in the substance for 3hrs? I'm not reading the whole study now, but that sounds...interesting.
From a quick read : It was tested in a cell culture, so not in a human or animal. That does change a lot of things.
For the dosage:
> Thereafter, hCMECs were treated116 with regular media or media containing 6 mM erythritol (Sigma Aldrich, Cat #E7500; St. Louis MO), a117 dose equivalent to a typical amount of erythritol [30g] in a single can of commercially available118 artificially sweetened beverage, for 24 hours (N=5 experimental units)
The article points out that similar observations have already been made in human subjects:
> Positive associations between circulating erythritol and incidence of heart attack and stroke have been observed in U.S. and European cohorts
The primary human study they reference (Witkowski et al., 2023) has a few issues:
- All subjects had a "high prevalence of CVD and risk factor burden" and represented the sickest patients in the healthcare system
- Erythritol was measured only once at baseline, despite data which shows that levels fluctuate dramatically with consumption
- It did not differentiate between dietary intake and erythritol produced by the body
- Seeing as they were already sick they the subjects may have been consuming more artificial sweeteners than the general population
There are two more human studies referenced but I didn't read them.
In this case, the nature of the study is clearly acknowledged, it does not “change a lot of things”:
> We recognize given the in vitro, isolated single cell nature of this study we cannot make definitive translational conclusions or assertions regarding erythritol and clinical risk. However, the markers and mediators of brain microvascular endothelial cell function studied herein have been shown to have strong causative links with the development cerebrovascular dysfunction, neuronal damage and injury, thrombosis and acute ischemic stroke
These findings are a starting point for further understanding, not something to be immediately ranked as true/false.
Thus, rather than submitting articles like the current, rather wait until anything more is available. We are tired of clickbait as well.
How long more to wait?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There's rarely profit in demonstrating that novel compounds are dangerous so it's extremely unlikely for a given dangerous novel compound that there will be any decisive studies showing the danger.
IMHO the novel compound should have to be decisively shown to be safe before being sold in food, but since they are not, I recommend everyone avoid novel compounds as much as it's practicable.
But to your points, if there aren't any studies which can show that a compound is dangerous in any meaningful way, why would you want to avoid it? (Given there is a need or purpose, e.g, a low-calories sweetener.)
Also, decisively showing something to be safe is impossible in a similar way that software tests can only show that you haven't found any bugs yet, it doesn't mean there are none. (Off-topic: That's a quote from Edsger Dijkstra, which the following can be added: he is right, but for unit tests - using types, property testing or by running through the entire argument space for a pure function you actually can show that there are no bugs.)
Here's an example. Company A invents compound B and pays company C to do safety studies that monitor the subjects for a few weeks or months. The study shows no significant danger. They start selling compound B in food or as medicine. Then 10 years later after millions of people have ingested varying amounts of compound B, it's found to cause some harm that wasn't found in the initial study. Company A pays a fine of less than the profit they made selling compound B, and compound B is pulled from the market.
There are many stories like that. Should I have avoided compound B on the precautionary principle? Or, because the only science done so far in those first 10 years showed it was safe, should I have considered it safe?
In the case of food additives it's even worse. Company A makes compound B, it's in food, no studies are done, millions of people eat it, are harmed, and no one knows for years or decades.
Personally I think introducing novel compounds to the body is just a bad idea period and I avoid them as much as is practicable. Too many have been found to be dangerous only decades later, and we have a population with rapidly rising rates of chronic disease and cancer etc that could be related to toxic stuff. Why risk it. And especially why trust science that is paid for by the companies that will profit if the science shows their thing to be safe?!
---
There _could_ be ways to show safety of something to a point, like do a 20 (or 50) year study with large cohorts where one population uses compound B and the other doesn't and monitor overall outcomes. But that's far too expensive and time consuming and not required so basically no one does it. Companies want to profit from their novel compounds fast.
> In this case, the nature of the study is clearly acknowledged, it does not “change a lot of things”:
> These findings are a starting point for further understanding, not something to be immediately ranked as true/false.
Yes I know this and do not dismiss their research at all. I have been in the same boat, having to write at the end of a paper "We have proven a certain link between Y and X in this very limited experiment A, a wider, deeper research would be needed to prove if any such link exists in much larger condition B". This is normal, and how most scientific advencement is made.
But look, I don't think the average HN user comes to this article and comment section thinking what happened when you put erythritol on a cell culture outside of a living organism. They care about what is the consequences of consuming erythritol on them. So a small clarification comment stating the 2 importants conditions of the experiment (cell culture + dosage) is usually useful if you don't have the time to read the whole study and if you came here just to know if you should stop consuming your favorite sweetened drink right now.
This contradicts several reasonably large high quality studies using a low grade substitute for human testing. The burden of proof is on the researchers making a surprising claim in contrast to existing evidence.
Wake me up when this dude gets a paper accepted in a reputable peer reviewed journal. Then I will read what he has to say and add it to my list of "worthwhile" sources to form my conclusion on Erythritol.
Other than that, online forum comments are just mental candy floss to read while taking my morning caffeine fix.
Erythritol has had a lot of top class human studies on it. This is an extreme weak study with a shocking conclusion.
Potato, potahtoe.
One is intentionally misspelled.
For most everyday lay people, you should be looking at meta-analysis. We just don't have the context to hone-in on one study and examine how correct it is or what it actually means for our everyday lives.
They should really be an occasional treat.
In the case of sweet, I have found that simply minimizing eating sweet things has caused everything else to taste better/sweeter.
wglb•21h ago
mjd•15h ago
This is the study that the article is talking about. The complete paper is https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/japplphysiol...
It's based on earlier work that suggests that erythritol consumption is associated with increased risk of stroke or myocardial infarction: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02223-9
wglb•5h ago