Study: Artificial sweeteners toxic to digestive gut bacteria | Hacker News Reader

Study: Artificial sweeteners toxic to digestive gut bacteria

cnbc.com

299 pointsshawn130 comments

The underlying research article (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.

I'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.

I 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.

> treat artificial sweeteners as a single group

In defense of an otherwise-poor study, it didn't do this. Six of the most common artificial sweeteners were tested on the bacterial assay and their results reported and discussed separately. Another sequence of assays was run on a panel of sports supplements with varying sweeteners. It looks to me like the only reason for grouping these chemicals was practical - they have interchangeable dietary uses, so it's helpful to observe their varying responses on a single test.

It'd be a pretty interesting study, except that the assay's quality and sensitivity seem hugely in doubt.

Doubling down on that point a bit more -

I think that, assuming the study is high quality, one that looks at all the popular artificial sweeteners together is probably more valuable from a "practical application" perspective, because it allows you to make more of an apples-to-apples comparison among the individual sweeteners.

If all you've got is bunch of isolated studies that only look at one of them at a time, you'll always have some room for doubt about whether a difference in outcome reflects the sweetener being tested, or some difference in the experimental protocol.

Whether or not that is the case, it seems to me the most interesting conclusion of the study was this:

> the bacterial responses were correlated to the results of previous toxicity studies and bacteria may be used as a toxicity evaluation tool.

One would want to establish that this method is actually useful, no? It seem this study is pointing in that direction.

If it is effective, there may be interesting ways you can use this test, such as:

> The tested bioluminescent bacterial panel can potentially be used for detecting artificial sweeteners in the environment.

Those are interesting possibilities, but they seem crippled by the underlying failure to calibrate or prove the assay.

It's possible there's prior lit here and I'm just not seeing the reference, but it looks like there's no claim that these changes are sweetener-specific. Without that I don't think it's a viable environmental test.

The correlation with prior toxicity work is more promising since this looks like a relatively easy test, but I still have some questions about how robust that correlation is to changing substances and dosages.

When the top two comments say the study is fundamentally flawed, I’d say it’s a good reason to flag it off the front page.

Well, the top two comments say the study is fundamentally flawed and they make decent arguments for their case, rather than just spewing upvote-bait HN conventional wisdom...

Actually, I’d say it’s a good reason to keep it visible. First thing I did after I’d read the first paragraph was hit ‘back’ and open the discussion thread. Who funded the study? Is the science valid? Stifling discussion about something by demoting it to the nether realms is counter-productive.

Top 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_...

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....

The 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.

> erythritol (looks, feels and cooks almost exactly like sugar)

The taste is quite different though.

Perhaps. This is subjective. But I could hardly tell the difference.

The taste difference will never let it pass as candy on its own. It has to be used in foods where other flavors can dominate it, and only let the sweetness through.

It's not like it's bad, though. It's just not what sucrose-eaters are accustomed to.

I actually enjoy eating pure erythritol with a tablespoon.

FWIW, Erithritol doesn't taste like sugar to me, and tends to give me a headache. I've found that any of those "sugar alcohols" are really unpleasant for me. Not sure if this experience is shared by others, but I thought I would add my anecdote.

Yes, it is known that erythritol doesn't feel great to everybody but my experience with it was awesome - I ended up eating huge amounts of it with a tablespoon (resulting in no no unpleasant sensations) in bare form and baking meringues :-) But I've stopped buying it as it's a little bit expensive and supposedly has little health value, lactulose is a way better (but you can get kind of mild diarrhea if you consume too much of it as it has laxative properties).

Yeah, I'd be interested to know the effect of something like stevia extract on gut bacteria.

Stevia doesn't affect my gut bacteria much - it affects my taste buds too much for it to get that far.

Stevia is weird - to me it tastes absolutely awful in coffee and tea but pretty decent when not dissolved, e.g. over cereal or something.

I've found that some brands of stevia taste much better than others.

AFAIK there are many kinds of Stevia, it is not a name for a single substance marketed under a number of different brands, every brand of Stevia may differ significantly from the others. There are "stevias" that taste fairly unpleasant to me and there is a brand that tastes better than any candy I've ever tasted.

>BTW at least saccharine ad ace-k are already known to be carcinogenic AFAIK

Not according to the National Cancer Institute [1]. The amount of misinformation in nutrition is frustrating at times.

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d...

Paranoid mistrust, cancer fears, and fart-driven explosive diarrhea had already winnowed my list of non-sucrose sweeteners down to just erythritol, pure stevia powder, and very small amounts of xylitol.

I'll have to look into lactulose and palatinose.... And it looks like lactulose is out for the diarrhea reason, and isomaltulose--Palatinose is a trademarked name for it--looks practically identical to slow-motion sucrose, including caloric content. It has a lower glycemic index, but is half as sweet as sucrose, so you may end up consuming more calories for the same amount of sweetness.

Erythritol is not good for gut bacteria. It is 90% absorbed before reaching the colon, and excreted mostly intact in urine and feces, and the early absorption is why it doesn't have the diarrheal effect common to most sugar alcohols. Sweeteners that are neither absorbed nor digested draw water out of the digestive tract as they pass. Those that can be fermented by colon bacteria also tend to produce gases, that help push the water out. Xylitol is not fermentable, so the diarrhea you might get won't be quite so bad.

I think I'll stick with a mix of erthyritol and stevia, with proportions titrated such that equal-volume measures of erythritol/stevia and sucrose crystals have roughly equivalent sweetness. The flavor profile isn't quite right, but it's good enough for me until something better comes along.

(edit) I'll also add that it seems to work best in foods where other flavors can dominate. While you can sort of taste it as not being real sugar in lemonade, in sugar-free fudge, all you can taste is the sweetness. But it also forms crystals during cooling, and I haven't quite worked that out yet. Gritty/crunchy fudge is not exactly ideal.

I've found that stevia sweeteners with inulin (not insulin) seen to be beneficial for my gut bacteria. Actually seems to help with "loose days".

Sweetleaf is generally what I use.

Inulin may "help with loose days" much more than you probably think. It may actually help to systematically decrease your appetite and insulin resistance, decrease ghrelin (the "hunger hormone") and increase leptin (the "fullness hormone") if you eat it every day. I can recommend Dr. Raphael Kellman's "The microbiome diet" book for more info, it is easy and exciting to read and has a fair amount references to scientific research in it, it may happen that you will never have to worry about calories again after you read it.

To avoid crystals, maximize the variety of sugars. For example, if you had 20 different molecules, they wouldn't pack into crystals very well. If you are being a perfectionist, I think you'd want to do this by molar proportion rather than mass or volume.

For those paying less attention, by "different" I don't mean white sugar and raw sugar. Those are the same molecule.

According 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

Consuming 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.

Yeah 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.

BTW at least saccharine and ace-k are already known to be carcinogenic AFAIK

It would appear that the US FDA and European FSA disagree with you on that subject.

Concerning saccharin:

In a December 14, 2010 release, the EPA stated that saccharin is no longer considered a potential hazard to human health

Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin

Concerning Acesulfame potassium

Critics say acesulfame potassium has not been studied adequately and may be carcinogenic, although these claims have been dismissed by the European Food Safety Authority and FDA

Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acesulfame_potassium

Plus a report that lactobacillus concentration may actually be enhanced by artificial sweeteners:

In vitro analyses of Lactobacillus 4228 growth characteristics showed that presence of NHDC significantly reduces the lag phase of growth and enhances expression of specific sugar transporters, independently of NHDC metabolism. This study suggests that sensing of NHDC by a bacterial plasma membrane receptor underlies sweetener-induced growth of a health promoting gut bacterium.

Bacterial sensing underlies artificial sweetener-induced growth of gut Lactobacillus

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278045609_Bacterial...

Plus one of the last hold-outs to declassification of saccharin as carcinogenic was Health Canada which based the original prohibition on University of Nebraska studies but later concluded:

Such sodium salts, the council said, “produce tumours only when administered at high doses and only in rats,” thus “the mechanism by which the rats develop cancer is not present in humans.”

https://www.agcanada.com/daily/saccharin-cleared-for-use-in-...

Appears the jury is still out.

Thank you for a lot of interesting information. "Bacterial sensing underlies artificial sweetener-induced growth of gut Lactobacillus" seemed the most interesting to me, funny thing is it's about SUCRAM - a sweetener I've never heard about before now. Where can I possibly buy some? What kind of a chemical substance it even is? Does it have a more scientific name?

Doubt if you'd want to ingest it. It's a saccharin-based animal feed enhancer.

URL: http://alliednutrition.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/AN-Suc...

Thanks. I actually doubt many people can imagine my capacity to ingest things of questionable taste (up to what would make many people vomit) and safety (I don't care much if it's not been approved for human consumption) given a clue there is a chance it is going to enhance my health ;-)

Well then to hell with SUCRAM...

Start a liquid stenabolics (sr 9009) / weight training regimen coupled with piracetam (1.5g), choline (.5g), and Steven Hawking's purported vinpocetine supplements, TID, and you'll be like Conan the Barbarian (or Valeria) with a 20pt IQ boost in two months. (sorry, just kidding - a shrink friend recently started that routine and I'm curious to see how it goes)

Thanks. I'll study the information available about these substances and consider experimenting perhaps. But I believe these substances alone are not going to increase the IQ unless combined with actual mind training (in this case they probably can boost progress, I happen to be a very experienced piracetam user BTW). Let me recommend your friend to also consider exercising with BrainWorkshop (the only scientifically-proven way to increase fluid intelligence) some times a day and starting to learn a language that is very different from those they already know (i.e. a non indo-european one) and the synergic effect can actually be impressing.

As for prebiotics and probiotics - I have been getting increasingly enthusiastic about the gut microbiome subject during the recent months and have achieved amazing results this way and switched from extreme treatment to mild support regimen already yet I'm still very curious about whatever findings in this area.

BTW if you know of any tricks (other than taking choline, it's not enough) that can potentially increase acetylcholine secretion and/or sensitivity - I am very interested to learn them. I have been struggling from ACh deficiency symptoms during my whole life and the only efficient solution I've found so far is nicotine but I'd really love to replace it with something that doesn't cause physiological addiction.

Well done :)

Just added that comment for the fun of it but you are exactly correct concerning piracetam. From experience, it does take about two weeks to kick-in in earnest but during that time it's necessary to focus on some mentally-demanding skill. Also personally experimented with aniracetam but found that cognitively it morphs you into the proverbial 'Mr Spock' complete with persona.

Assume for ACh you're eating three eggs a day, soft-boiled for 6 1/2 minutes or fried sunny side up until a cataract forms over the yokes (pro dietician's recommendation I once received)

It looks like they may have been added since you read it, as they're in the article now.

What I find problematic is that they list a concentration, but no real world examples. We sell a concentrated product that contains 1.3mg sucralose per ml which would seem damning, if not for the fact it gets diluted 8-16x when mixed.

Current daily allowance is about 5mg/kg which for a 50kg/120lb person (very tiny) is 250mg. At 8x dilution this is 2 liters of sugar-free sweetened drinks.

Which actually doesn't sound that difficult to hit.

It is sad, but understandable, that only the mass quantity, low quality, sweeteners are being considered. Rarely are the alternative sweeteners used by health conscious consumers at home examined.

You mentioned erythritol, which is undergoing an explosion in popularity due to Swerve. Xylitol is available in Whole Foods, and even some regular grocers on occasion, and is a bit more work to good with but works very well for some uses. And of course Stevia, when used appropriately, is all over the place. Monk Fruit is also used on occasion, but its flavor profile has to be carefully considered.

As an aside, for those complaining about Stevia, the $6 bottle from Whole Foods has more than 10x as much Stevia in it as the $6 bottle from your local grocery store. Stevia is also not appropriate in all places, but as a replacement for simple syrup in gin drinks it is great, and it is also great to use in Lemonade and Limeade.

(In ice cream, or anyplace with dairy? Use something else, and maybe add a couple drops at the end for a bit extra of a kick.)

It looks like lactulose is prescription only in the US, so that makes it a no go for home chefs!

My ultimate advice for people though, it just get used to things not being sweet. After a couple weeks, the taste isn't missed, and food tastes a lot more subtle when everything isn't accompanied by a sweet aftertaste.

There 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.

Exactly. Most of that white powder in a sugar packet is dextrose filler.

How is dextrose in a sugar packet filler? That makes no sense to me. Maybe it's just a confusion of terms.

Maybe they meant cellulose?

Cellulose is used as an anti-caking/anti-clumping additive. It doesn't add bulk like the puffed up dextrose or maltodextrin does.

It's used as a filler in pre-grated "Parmesan" cheese. https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/ar...

I 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.

Someone made a chemistry joke that went over your head. Dextrose is sugar. Common in corn syrup, to be exact.

Yes, but the volume is higher than granular sugar. It's a "bulking agent" to give the sweetener a pleasing volume.

Dextrose is sugar just like cellulose is sugar.

>an 8 oz. cup of coffee with 16 packets of Splenda.

I have literally seen people do such things at Dunkin Donuts. "Yeah can I get a medium coffee with extra cream and 20 sugars." You WUT M8?

At a certain point you have to admit to yourself that you just don't like coffee.

With that much sugar I'm not sure if it's the flavour or texture you don't like.

I feel like we're ignoring scale here. 16 packets of Splenda in a mouse's stomach.

You might be right, I was inferring that the 16 packets was for human levels, but after reading it over again I am not sure that is the case.

A mouse is like 20g. No way are they shoving 16g's of splenda into one.

Well, they wouldn't be using all the filler in any splenda packet, would they? 12mg * 16 mixed into a liquid seems a bit more probable, if still unpleasant.

Absolutely. I didn't realize there was that much filler in a splenda packet. That stuff is incredibly strong.

I've seen that too. But unlike Starbucks which limits simmering time on a hot plate to less than 45 minutes at Dunkin Donuts and local dives you may get a cup of java that has been cooking for hours and tastes like battery acid. Hence the dozen packets of whatever sweetener.

Or, alternatively, 4-ish cans of Pepsi One.

Why four cans? The concentration doesn't increase with volume.

No, but the dose does.

Parent referred to equivalent concentration. The experimental dose was not the the chemical equivalent of 16 packets of Splenda.

The 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 (6 sweeteners) 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.

Seems 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 :(

> or it'll give you the shits

I believe that's a common side effect of sugar alcohols like xylitol.

> 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.

There 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-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.

That article says nothing about a laxative effect.

Exactly.

You failed to provide evidence that fruit exhibits no laxative effect. That study didn't report a laxative effect because it wasn't testing for a laxative effect.

It would have been reported as an adverse effect and it wasn't.

Right, and this isn't "Clearly bad for your gut" how? Nobody is claiming that eating "too much fruit" is good for your gut.

> breakfast cereals, yoghurts, ketchup-like sauces

If you're trying to avoid both sugar and sweeteners, those aren't the kinds of foods you're going to be eating... Unless you're referring to plain oats and plain yoghurt, which surely must be available unsweetened and unadulterated.

I’m always surprised at what people eat when they’re deliberately trying to be healthy. Things like Nutrigrain bars and GoGurt. Really makes me realize what a failure our labeling laws our when both can be sold as anything other than dessert.

> fizzy drinks like Sprite or Pepsi - which have sugar and sweetener

Assuming you're not referring to HFCS (the article mentions "aspartame, sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame, and acesulfame potassium-k" as the artificial sweeteners), I'm not seeing any artificial sweeteners in those drinks. Sprite has HFCS and Pepsi has HFCS and Sugar.

Sprite:

> CARBONATED WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CITRIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVORS, SODIUM CITRATE, SODIUM BENZOATE (TO PROTECT TASTE). [1]

Pepsi:

> CARBONATED WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CARAMEL COLOR, SUGAR, PHOSPHORIC ACID, CAFFEINE, CITRIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVOR [2]

[1] https://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/products/sprite/ori...

[2] http://www.pepsicobeveragefacts.com/Home/Product?formula=350...

Currently 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.

Some books I've read say increased portions are a symptom of something else. E.g. Inability to feel satisfied.

So, tying it back to artificial sweeteners, there's a fair bit of research to suggest that consuming them causes you to feel more hungry.

The real question is, are they still preferable to sugar anyway given the lower caloric value? My experience is yes.

Just 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 [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21255472

Processed 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.gi...

Realizing 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.

Interestingly, 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

Does this factor in the added sugar in most peanut butters? I can't find any without it around here.

Switch 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.

It 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.

Peanut butter without sugar is labeled as "natural peanut butter" in the US.

I'll keep this in mind to help reduce the guilt I feel after eating an entire jar with a spoon.

A full meal is 380 calories?

If someone is sick, they'll become slow. All they'll want to do is lie down some place quiet.

Watch kids, healthy kids. After a meal, all they want to do is run, talk, jump - move. Sitting still is the last thing they want to do.

My point is perhaps, sedentary behavior is caused by something, a symptom outside the control of those afflicted by it.

Here are some culprits we could explore:

Schooling: Being trained, forced to sit in a spot for hours could train people to be sedentary.

Processed food: Maybe its doing something to the body. Like how zombie ants are controlled by fungi.

Aging process: All animals become less active with age... Even snails.

Environment: Tech makes it harder to be active physically. A tv remote, car, internet for shopping...

Poverty: There's a proven link between experiencing poverty at a young age and inability to control food intake, and spend responsibly.

Genes: People used to bulk up for winter hunger. Now there's food all year round. But the lizard brain is still in control.

There might be more reasons why people binge eat, and remain sedentary such as processed water, poor air quality, domestication (The more Wolf gene a Dog has, the more active it is)...

Refined oils, fat, and animal protien cause arterial hardening immediately, lasting for several hours. Keep ingesting and you end up with heart disease....arteries filled with plaque restricting blood flow, raspiration, mental function. Ingesting refined sugar and flour causes an insulin spike (make fat out of carbs!) that lasts for hours causing a crash and repeated cravings for...more carbs. This leads to diabetes. Cancer needs sugar and animal protien to live.

Check out China study.

Citation for proof that arterial hardening happens immediately, and that animal protein specifically causes this (vs plant protein)? I've not seen this specific claim before.

I've seen the claim about animal protein many times before, never the sources.

It seems to be part of some pseudo-vegan zeitgeist. The denaturation process in cooking and digestion makes animal protein practically indistinguishable from plant protein. If there is any measurable dietary effect, it would be in the nutritional factors closely associated with those protein sources--for instance, the heme iron in animal meats, and the porphyric magnesium in green vegetable chlorophyll.

The proteins themselves are unlikely to have an effect beyond the ratios of their specific amino acid components, and the potential for indigestible misfolded prions. Animals are loaded with pepsins in their guts and proteases in the rest. By the time an amino acid reaches your arteries, if has already been broken down and built back up into something else.

A simple web search turns up pseudoscience and broscience everywhere. If there ever was a real dietary health study, it's now buried in the noise.

Fat is slept on macronutrient because of the misguided idea that increased fat = increased cholesterol in arteries. Vitamin K2 is an important vitamin that isn't metabolized well from foods containing K1 (vegetables). Animal sources and natto (fermented soy beans) are the best sources of it. It has been shown to help with heart disease, cancer and bone health.

The interesting thing with animal protein is that no study has shown a dose dependent increase in cancer when consuming more of it. Chronic inflammation from gluten, processed foods, pesticides, refined carbs, and refined sugars are the biggest culprits in dietary endorsed cancer.

So you are denying that endothelial dysfunction and it's triggers exist? Interesting.

Its triggers are high insulin, high fasting blood sugar, high triglycerides and low ldl. These are all caused by the food types I listed. High fat low carb diets have been shown to reduce all of these symptoms.

You are looking for reasons outside of "me". It's "they" (aka school), caused by "that" (food/chemical) and so on.

Not that it might not contribute, actually I would be surprised if it didn't somehow, but - its "us". You, me, everybody. We are lazy, we are overworked, we just sit on our asses whole day, lack sleep, eat junk food, drink crappy drinks, we know damn well we should exercise often but still we don't because blah blah. All these are personal decisions.

Anybody can look for excuses to feel a victim of the evil world and genes, or one can do something about it. Steps are crystal-clear these days, and super simple. Results are 100% guaranteed to get your life better, live longer etc. No excuse is good enough.

Depression is a hell of a drug. Add in constant doom and gloom from every corner of society (why live to be 120 if it's all downhill from here?), a bit of apathy, and a dash of hedonism (with unlimited distractions-you can have endless entertainment without leaving the house) and you've got a potent cocktail.

I'm not sure most humans are built to overcome these hurdles, and they're just becoming larger as time goes on.

By this rhetoric, a lack of obesity and obesity-related illness in a population indicates that the population has consciously decided to be healthier, eat healthier, exercise more, and work less. In short, they are morally superior entities with stronger wills.

Since obesity and obesity-related illnesses spiked in America in the 1970s, and the rhetoric here implies that such illnesses are primarily about conscious choice and will, the conclusion is that humans in america before 1970 were stronger people- in will, mind, body. They were a more disciplined, moral people, who had the will to resist all unhealthy and processed foods, sleep properly, and work reasonable hours doing active labor.

I find that quite confusing, because I don't recall that ever being the case.

the rhetoric here implies that such illnesses are primarily about conscious choice and will, the conclusion is that humans in america before 1970 were stronger people

No, that conclusion is incorrect. And equally valid hypothesis is that "industries" have become much better at making people choose against their own interest (and against their health). Maybe television has played a big part in that?

This hypothesis ignores that the post I am analyzing is against attributing external factors as a primary cause for obesity and obesity-related illness.

Agreed. It's something environmental. People did not suddenly change in the 70's. Some of us are old enough to have been around then :-)

I think it is largely about the environment in which people live and kids are raised. Losing energy as we age has always been true. The lizard brain hasn't changed.

The environment has changed significantly.

The availability of food, especially cheap sugar and processed foods.

Tech to occupy our time and not letting kids play outside.

Kids that grow up eating McDonalds every meal and Soda with every meal. That is normal to them and very difficult to ever break from that if that's been your entire life and if the people around you are functioning that way.

Already 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.

I 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!”

I 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/

It 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.

Perhaps this an avenue towards a new type of antibiotic?

Anecdotally 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.

It'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?

You 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...

Meh, 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".

Off-topic, here is one of my favorite HN comments ever, about artificial sweeteners: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566

Reading this while enjoying my diet coke was a bad idea.

I 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.

It 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.

I'm not a mouse...

>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.

Yes, 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.

Putting that aside, they also give you horrible gas.

Anyone know how gut bacteria respond to Stevia?

When will we have artificial fat?

Oh 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.

The 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.

Huh? 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.

It links to two studies.

Neotame (2018-02-09) @ https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367

Sweeteners (2018-09-25) @ https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454

The 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

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