The prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease has, it’s worth noting, sharply increased in recent decades.
Then there are artificial sweeteners like sucralose and saccharin, which we consume in diet sodas and “sugar-free” snacks in hopes of cutting calories. Our bodies can’t directly digest most of them — they’re meant to pass right through — but it turns out that the microbes inhabiting our colons can metabolize the sweeteners, potentially to our detriment.
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have found that, in mice, saccharin causes glucose intolerance, a marker of impending diabetes — and one disease that those who eat these sweeteners are probably trying to avoid. When the scientists transplanted microbes from mice fed saccharine to mice that hadn’t consumed the sweetener, the recipient animals developed glucose intolerance as well, suggesting that the microbiome that was warped by the sweetener, not the sweetener itself, was causing the problems.