Sucralose is a negative modulator of T cell-mediated responses in mice

It was later discovered the harmful metabolite does not occur in humans. But the regulations still didn’t get rolled back. Enjoy your fake root beer.

Edit: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030048...

It's a problem of bad journalism coupled with lazy readership, aka "scientists dicover..." articles.

This is a deeper problem than mice or science "journalism". There is some fundamental asymmetry in people's desire for information vs their capacity to understand information.

Kind of like how I'm not a programmer or business owner but... here I am.

Perhaps it was the mixed messaging from the CDC in 2020, or the hesitancy to investigate lab origins. I know people who have gone full circle on both issues as their ideology evolved. People are primed to find "the reason" not to trust a scientific result they don't like and animal analogs are low hanging fruit you can grab without reading more than a sentence of a paper.

That doesn't make the research invalid, but a certain bias against the ultimate applicability of animal studies is not only reasonable but empirically supported.

OTOH, there's the quote "rats, when experimented upon, develop cancer" (attribution lost in the mist of time), so some caution is certainly warranted.

Mice would never conduct experiments on humans with levels that were not relevant for their daily lifes.

Also, one should never read into a single study too much.

The problem with sugar isn't consuming it, but rather consuming it all the time. And of course I mean excessive sugar, not the 4 grams that are in every 100 grams of bread.

I'm not sure that scaling is an option outside of GM crops - I can't imagine that it's being synthesised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum

There is no magic but,most of what we eat in the west is shit

Eat fruit, where sugar comes with fiber and vitamins/minerals and you will be fine (you are biologically a primate and they binge on fruit -- fruit and thereby sugar should thus be fine as our main source of calories).

One note to add: primates do not eat fatty foods and humans do. In the presence of fat, we cannot handle sugar (and thus fruit) very well and may lead to type2.

Normal sugar in moderation with large time periods between calories.

I've concluded personally that it's still probably the best option - a teaspoon here and there, even daily, probably won't do much if it's near or in a meal. You know what you're getting: simple sugars have been part of the human diet for milennia, and we understand their metabolism reasonably well.

People who use the alternatives are making a much riskier bet on the null hypothesis of future research.

It was something I discovered by doing thruhikes, eating the most protein and calorie dense light foods on the shelf of whatever tiny town I hitchhiked into and drinking fresh spring water every day. Now soda tastes terrible to me compared to ice cold spring water with balanced minerals and I can appreciate the texture and earthy flavor of unflavored and unsalted lentils.

Anyway, this is an example of why I'm skeptical of anyone framing dietary choices as "X is healthy".

That said, your confusion probably originated with Splenda’s “tastes like sugar ‘cause it’s made from sugar” marketing, which was ruled to be misleading.

Cyanide is a natural molecule, and rattle snake venom is made of natural molecules.

Research enantiomers and, more generally, chirality.

The laws governing Chemistry don't align well with the human intuitive understanding of similarity.

> Overall, these findings suggest that a high intake of sucralose can dampen T cell-mediated responses, an effect that could be used in therapy to mitigate T cell-dependent autoimmune disorders.