Last week I discussed why you shouldn’t freak out about the latest news about artificial sweeteners.  This week, I will give a bit more information on the study, now that I have obtained a full-text copy of it from professional resources.  Specifically, I will let you how much the humans were consuming and real food recommendations you can take from this study, as yes, there are some take-home messages for some of the population, particularly diet soda/pop drinkers, and not as much for those who use packets of artificial sweetener.

Before I get started, I would like to link to this post in theguardian.com about how journals like Nature, Cell, and Science are damaging science due to incentives.  I agree with a lot of what this writer says.  Back to my post.

According to the human trial in this study, the only sweetener tested was saccharin, which is sold as Sweet N Low (the pink packets).  Thus, everything I say will apply only to saccharin.  The science doesn’t speak strongly for other sweeteners at this time because they were mice experiments.  Similar pathways and mechanisms for glucose intolerance based on species of microbiota present in mice can be surmised, but it is only preliminary and cannot be assumed the same happens for all human populations.

Before we go into specifics, the humans studied were not well-controlled based on the paper description. There is not a mention of the type of humans other than that they were “seven healthy volunteers (5 males and 2 females, aged 28-36) who do not normally consume NAS or NAS-containing foods for 1 week.”  NAS means non-caloric artificial sweeteners (more on researchers writing in code in another blog post…).  We don’t know anything about these humans’ weights, heights, race, diet, exercise habits, stress, family history of diabetes, etc.  That’s a lot of information to not have about these subjects.

The humans were given the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) maximum acceptable daily intake of commercial saccharin of 5 mg per kilogram body weight in three divided daily doses equivalent to 120 mg, totaling 360 mg a day.  They were monitored by continuous glucose measurements and daily glucose tolerance tests (GTT).  Doing some math, this is the maximum dose allowed for someone who is about 158 lbs.  There was no mention of the individual humans’ weights.  A glucose tolerance test is when someone ingests 75 g of glucose (which is about five 8″ tortillas or two cans of Coke, if Coke was pure glucose and not fructose, in 5 minutes time) and researchers measure blood glucose at regular intervals afterwards for three hours.

I would think that just taking a glucose tolerance test every day for 6 days would have an effect on glucose tolerance, but they were also consuming the maximum “safe” amount of saccharin on top of it.  There were four participants who experienced glucose intolerance, and the researchers noted that their gut bacteria had higher counts of Bacteroides fragilis, Weissella cibaria, and Candidatus Arthromitus.

To get the same amount of saccharin (360 mg) a day the subjects had, you would have to consume 10 packets of Sweet N Low per day, since each packet has 36 mg of saccharin.  So unless you are using that many Sweet N Low packets a day, I wouldn’t worry about this study.

The only diet soda I know that still uses saccharin is called Tab, produced by The Coca-Cola Company, with 96 mg of saccharin per 12 fluid ounce can.  The FDA also sets a limit of 12 mg saccharin per fluid ounce.  So unless you drink 4 of these 12 fluid ounce cans per day, as well as eat large amounts of pure glucose sugar along side it equivalent to a glucose tolerance test without any other food to slow down that glucose absorption (such protein and fat found in whole foods), I wouldn’t worry about artificial sweeteners yet.

What’s your take on this study?  Do you disagree with my conclusions?  Did I miss something?  Please comment and share.

Tags: food science, glucose intolerance, gut bacteria, microbiota, microflora, probiotics, science

Edit 9/25/14: I have received a full-text copy of the study and made a follow-up blog post to this one on the human intervention part of this study as well as quantified the amounts of saccharin you must eat to experience the effects the humans achieved in the study.

One of this week’s catchy nutrition-related headlines is “Artificial sweeteners could cause spikes in blood sugar.”  Rant ON…

The real scientific article published in Nature says “Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota,” and if you read the article abstract, which is all the public has access to unless you pay for the article or are at an academic or professional institution that has access to the article, you will see that the experiment was done on MICE.  They demonstrated that feeding MICE artificial sweeteners changes MOUSE gut bacteria, transplanted the gut bacteria into a germ free MOUSE, and then those MICE also had the same metabolic profile as the MICE eating whatever concentration of artificial sweeteners they were fed.

These studies have already been conducted, i.e. studies that show the gut microflora has an impact on your body chemistry, in other studies with mice fecal transplantation. There are also case studies of humans with bowel inflammation being cured at high rates with fecal transplantation from healthy individuals.

What this article does NOT show is that humans who consume artificial sweeteners, likely in amounts that don’t quite reach that which mice were fed (but who can say, since the public doesn’t have access to the article without paying), are likely to experience the same metabolic derangements.  Yes, humans may have some of the same metabolic pathways that could be affected by the bacteria, but the study did NOT show that humans who eat artificial sweeteners WILL GET spikes in blood sugar or experience glucose intolerance.

Glucose intolerance is affected by quite a number of other factors, not just artificial sweeteners, such as inactivity and overall caloric content and macronutrient distributation (carbs/fat/protein) of that diet.  The idea that a small amount of artificial sweetener is a game breaker for humans is highly unlikely.

I chew gum with artificial sweetener daily because it keeps my breath fresh when working with clients and lacks real sugar, which feeds oral bacteria that may promote cavities in humans.  Some days I might have 4 pieces of gum.  I don’t have glucose intolerance OR cavities.  Far from it.  I’m very physically active and eat a balanced diet to match my caloric expenditure.  Unless artificial sweeteners represent a significant portion by weight of food you are eating, I would not give these headlines any more credence.

These headlines are more likely to hurt those who exhibit obsessive-compulsive tendencies to avoid anything at all possible that MIGHT be considered bad (colloquially termed orthorexia).  Articles like these cause undo anxiety for these people who don’t know who to believe so just dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s when it comes to nutrition, regardless of the strength of the science and the source of the information.

Rant OFF.  Please comment and share.

Tags: food science, glucose intolerance, gut bacteria, microbiota, microflora, probiotics, science