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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

This has been hinted at before, some LCS have been measured to cause an insulin response in spite of being low or no calorie. Insulin added to the blood with no sugars to neutralize is bad for the body/can slowly cause insulin resistance.

What's also interesting is that Aspartame keeps on coming out ahead in study after study. No insulin response, no substantial side effects, and no proven cancer risk.

From everything I've read if you're only going to consume one LCS then make it Aspartame, it has had more research conducted on it than all of the others combined (and frankly most, even natural, food ingredients).

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There have been studies where mice were fed a diet of various natural and non-caloric sweeteners. The mice were monitored for blood sugar levels and cholesterol as well as other measures. The mice who ate all three of the most popular artificial sweeteners had worse outcomes on several measures. There is some additional evidence that the effect is largely due to the sweeteners' effect on the composition of gut bacteria. I can't tell you if this holds up (or if it holds for humans) but aspartame does not seem to be harmless in these studies.

2: https://www.businessinsider.com/artificial-sweeteners-aspart...

Link to one actual study: https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367

> The dose (0.75 mg/kg body weight/day) > was 2.5× human allowed daily intake (ADI) (0.3 mg/kg body >weight/day) for neotame set by the U.S. FDA.

Neotame is 8000 * sweeter than sugar so this is the sweetness equivalent of 0.6 Kg of sugar a day or 2,348 calories for a 100kg human. This is also 8.4 * the average daily sugar consumption in the US.

Monk fruit may be promising, there has been studies in Mice where Monk Fruit even lowered blood sugar levels. However, I agree more studies must be completed.

Another study including Aspartame, monk fruit, stevia and sucrose was kind of interesting which showed sucrose (as expected) had the biggest insulin spike, but interestingly the participants made up for the sucrose calories in their next meal and actually had higher insulin spikes in the subsequent meal compared to the sucrose group. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27956737

Probably best to avoid all sweeteners.

As a type 1 diabetic, I can confirm that vast quantities of aspartame do not cause my blood sugar to rise.

GPs claim was that non-aspartame sweeteners cause insulin to rise, not blood-sugar. This would cause non-diabetics to become hypoglycemic, and over a long-term could cause type 2 diabetes.

I always assumed that when I taste something sweet, my body starts putting insulin in my blood. Over time it learns how much to put in based on how sweet the food tasted. If that's true, I'd expect too much insulin for food with aspartame, BUT ALSO too little when food has real sugar, because of the long term learning.

I'd expect a type 1 diabetic not to see either effect because the system that aspartame wacks out of tune is turned off for them.

I appreciate that I have no actual knowledge on the subject, except that I know the body must have control loops for this stuff and they must be kept in calibration by some mechanism. Probably my model is too simple.

I can do better than assume.

"Tasting sweet food elicits insulin release prior to increasing plasma glucose levels, known as cephalic phase insulin release" https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/biomedres/28/2/28_2_79/...

What does LCS stand for? low carb sugar?

one more q, is the insulin spike level of fake sugar similar to that of a regular sugar?

Appears to mean Low Calorie Sweetener

oh right that makes more sense thanks!

Whats absolutely wild to me is how we're learning of any of this now, despite many of the LCS's being out for decades.

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