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Comment by JohnWhigham | Hacker News Reader

This article is nothing new, we've known this. Body sees sweet thing, releases insulin in anticipation, but there's no calories to process. And now you've just increased your insulin resistance.

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I've done much N=1 testing of this proposition with a blood glucose monitor, and haven't found it to be true for me. I get a spike when I drink something sweet and sugary, but not when I drink something sweetened with sucralose, aspartame, stevia, etc.

Aren't you measuring glucose instead of insulin though? I might expect a spike in insulin after a spike in glucose, but the other way around doesn't seem as likely.

Same here. It also doesn't interrupt my fasting in a noticeable way, so I don't think the insulin delivered is enough to really worry about.

The theory is that you’d see a drop in blood sugar after drinking something with an artificial sweetener not a spike.

I don't see an identifiable reaction, though perhaps some statistics can pull one out. The reaction from a sugary drink is consistent and dramatic.

I'm not entirely certain myself if artificial sweeteners cause insulin spikes, but it's worth pointing out the difference in numbers between high and low blood sugar. Normal blood sugar is what, 90-100 mg/dl or so, while the diagnostic criteria for low blood sugar starts at 70 mg/dl. Meanwhile symptoms for high blood sugar start above 200 (or even sometimes 300) mg/dl. Presumably cravings for sugary foods kicks in well above 70mg/dl too.

Simply put a spike in blood sugar due to a sugary food is much, much bigger than the drop in blood sugar sufficient to trigger a change in eating habits. And that's before we consider the impact of non-insulin hormones on our behavior, such as Ghrelin, which won't show up on a blood glucose test at all.

Yeah this is straight up just false. Insulin is not released based on taste, that would be very problematic. Some studies have found very low levels of insulin based on taste and feelings of eating but that's it.

no, it's good planning. cephalic phase insulin release.

Cephalic phase insulin release has not been demonstrated based purely on sweet taste of liquids. Some studies show no effect, others find a very weak effect on the order of 1% of actually eating.

Based upon this meta study, it seems that, while there is some evidence for CPIR, it doesn't do much.

https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/11/5/1364/5855277

This is a common myth, but most diet sodas use aspartame, not sucralose. No link between aspartame and insulin levels has been found.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/artificial-sweeteners-b...

There's also some evidence that artificial sweeteners affect the composition of the gut microbiome [1], which could be more influential (over the long term) than the taste/insulin theory. See also: evidence that different sweeteners have different impact on gut bacteria, which could make it easier to test which effect is more significant.

[1] e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363527/

Not for aspartame, which is the primary sweetener used in diet sodas

> So far, only saccharin and sucralose (NNSs) and stevia (NS) change the composition of the gut microbiota.

The results are all over the place. Some articles says continuous low-dose aspartame has effects [1], others say that aspartame has other effects on quorum sensing [2]. I'm not in this area so I can't judge any of this work, I just think it's interesting.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [2] https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/18/9863

People talk a lot about stevia, and it's prominently displayed on packaging, but then when I look at the ingredients, the sweetener is actually mostly sugar alcohols.

Is stevia ever used alone? If it's just a "fig leaf" so to speak, then perhaps the health effects of the sugar alcohols would be more relevant.

Iirc aspartame hasn't been shown to increase insulin release

another similar thing is chewing-gums. Body starts chewing, produce more saliva, and some enzymes, but nothing comes down as expected. Or reversly, when food is not chewed, the body misses an important step

Yeah I thought we already knew this. Maybe not for sucralose specifically?

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