And Now Xylitol
science.org
science.org
Summary from your article:
> xylitol consumption is that diet isn’t the only source of circulating xylitol. This compound is also produced by our own bodies through a process known as the glucuronate pathway, one of the pathways by which we metabolize glucose. So how did the authors ensure they were investigating the relationship between dietary xylitol intake and MACE risk? They didn’t.
> This research group followed the same flawed design and ended up with the same flawed conclusions. SSDD – same [study], different day.
> At best, this work shows that endogenous xylitol correlates with – but doesn’t necessarily contribute to – cardiovascular risk. Far from condemning xylitol as an ingredient in foods and beverages, these data provide no insight whatsoever on potential negative effects of dietary xylitol intake [...] xylitol may even offer advantages for health.
> So in summary, this work should ring a few bells – but there’s no need for it to ring any alarms.
The investigators did not collect any data on xylitol intake from their human cohort, so we have no way of correlating consumption with MACE risk because we have no way of knowing which participants were regularly consuming xylitol-containing foods. And although xylitol is currently a very common sweetening additive, Witkowski et al. note that the majority of their study participants were enrolled prior to xylitol’s widespread use, suggesting that circulating levels measured in their observational cohort may not be attributable to dietary intake.
Since it's commonly added to candies and even some forms of peanut butter, please be careful when leaving these things around your kitchen. A few pieces of Ice Breakers sugarless gum can kill a 50lb dog.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/paws-xylitol-...
Glad to see a balanced perspective on this. Everything in moderation.
"Lard" is "completely natural" and is bad in massive quantities, just like aspartame would be.
Since I'm not that used to artificial sweateners ( I dont drink coke or anything related to sugar ), the taste was noticiable inmediatly, it didn't bother me, it was just a curious feeling of being able to detect it so quickly. I ate like 3 or 4, those things were addictive.
What bothered me was what happened a couple of hours later, I had a massive stomach bloat and ache, higher than normal body temperature and generally felt like I was gonna throw it up and I couldn't hold it. After an hour of lying in the sofa I said that it was enough and indeed, threw up my dinner that night.
To my list of things I don't eat, xylitol was added inmediatly, I have never felt so sick, so fast in so little time.
Look I don't think this kind of comment adds any value to this discussion. There's a linked paper here and it's useful to discuss it. But humans all eat food, and if we start chiming into every nutrition article with random anecdotes about what we eat, then the purpose of keeping HN a high quality site goes away. The science is hard enough to get straight, adding random anecdotes lowers whatever signal we have.
[1]: https://www.ynhh.org/services/nutrition/sugar-alcohol.aspx
The human desire for sweet foods is also quite natural. Sweetness is one of the fundamental tastes that humans can detect, and we naturally seek out sweet foods.
Traditional diets and foodstuffs aren't necessarily optimal, but they do evidence themselves as adequate for sustaining a community for some number of centuries.
Novel diets and foodstuffs don't have that benefit, and are often accepted into daily life on a weakly evidenced hunch that its "safe until proven otherwise" and an often unevidenced assumption that it must at least be better than whatever imperfect thing its replacing.
Choosing not to hop onto the hype train for every new novelty is a personal choice, but a decidedly reasonable one.
In the case of sugars and sugar substitutes, adhering to a traditional pattern simply means treating sweetness as a luxury and accent rather than a daily staple. Not a big ask for people who mean to care about their health (not everyone needs to).
Would it surprise you to know that as recently as 1850 in the USA 50% of all children died before the age of 5? Does that change your opinion of how well people were doing in 'history'?
> Novel diets and foodstuffs don't have that benefit, and are often accepted into daily life on a weakly evidenced hunch that its "safe until proven otherwise" and an often unevidenced assumption that it must at least be better than whatever imperfect thing its replacing.
Can you explain what you mean by this in relation to xylitol? It is not a 'fad' or 'novel' diet.
> In the case of sugars and sugar substitutes, adhering to a traditional pattern simply means treating sweetness as a luxury and accent rather than a daily staple. Not a big ask for people who mean to care about their health (not everyone needs to).
I assume that you eat wild game and refrain from non-local and out of season ingredients as well?
What you are saying makes complete sense, but it's important to have in mind that when going all-in with "traditional" foods, one still needs to worry about overall intake - the century-old foods can still kill you if your diet isn't balanced.
Why should anyone worry about this substance in low doses?
We are a long-lived species, way more so than most mammals. Consuming some substance for 30 years will have a different effect on us than on normal forest critters, which mostly don't live to be 30.