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Comment by jcynix | Hacker News Reader

”Erythritol occurs naturally in some fruit and fermented foods." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythritol

The German Wikipedia article says it appears naturally in cheese, funghi, plums, strawberries and pistachios. So maybe the lab experiment might be a bit artifial, or the dose much higher than from normal consumption if the above?

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The dose people use for sweetener can be 1,000x - 10,000x the amount you'd find in fruit. There's micro to milligrams of it in some foods, people eat anywhere between 3g to 20g+ if they're eating goods baked with it as a sugar replacement.

Erithritol is also produced endogenously from glucose in the lower intestine of humans.

I'm struggling to find a good source on this right now but I remember reading that it could be as high as 10% of all glucose is converted this way.

>We report a previously unrecognized metabolism of glucose to erythritol, and given the association between erythritol and weight gain, research is needed to understand whether and how this pathway contributes to weight gain risk.

Erythritol is a pentose-phosphate pathway metabolite and associated with adiposity gain in young adults | PNAS https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1620079114

The concern is more unnatural consumption. Some use it as a sugar replacement in drinks and foods.

There is also the topic of erythritol-induced diarrhea in higher consumption.

Its almost like these days people are desperately grasping for anything that will deliver weight loss, apart from changing their longterm unhealthy fucking eating habits. US is a long term champion but it has slowly crept into most cultures, just not at that scale yet.

Food portion size, its composition and breaking some sweat regularly works wonders but nobody ain't got time or willpower for that.

Anecdotally, I have not experienced diarrhea with consumption up to 100g of erythritol in a day. I also do not consume it for weight loss purposes but as a sugar replacement because sugar causes inflammatory immune system reactions in my body.

Migrants who move to the US skinny on average gain weight, and these are people who have good eating habits and willpower. When 30% are obese and 60% overall are overweight, willpower and individual responsibility are not the tools for the job.

I'd be looking at breaking up food conglomerates first personally.

Ah, the "willpower" myth.

No study has been able to objectively define "willpower" in such a way that doesn't include eating habits, but does correlate with body fat percentage. IOW: If you define "willpower" as the ability to avoid obesity, then yes, it is related to obesity, but otherwise it is not.

See also addiction.

Going on a tangent, another natural sugar alternative called allulose also induces diarrhea in higher doses.

So does the Vitamin C. Not sure what is your point.

The mechanism by which alternative sweeteners work induces diarrhea or other abdominal issues.

Note that erithritol has a much lower laxative effect than other sugar alcohols.

Arsenic appears naturally in many foods. It's a heavy metal that occurs in varying amounts in the environment; albeit almost never at toxic levels.

Dosage is still a thing.

In natural foods, there are other substances that balance out the harm, making it healthy overall. These other substances are absent when it's used as an additive.

No, I'm sorry but that's not correct. "Natural" is a meaningless health and wellness buzzword that handwaves away the details that each food comes with benefits and disadvantages. There are variable amounts of anti-nutrients almost every "natural" ingredient, some of which we process or cook to lessen them.

Indigenous people processed acorns to remove tanins.

Kidney beans (and many other legumes to variably lesser degree) naturally contain phytohaemagglutinins (PHA-E) which cause red blood cells to clump together. These can be reduces several orders of magnitude by repeated cooking, washing, and draining.

Men shouldn't eat too much soy or chia seeds. Small amounts of chia seeds are fine.

Most adults are lactose intolerant unless they have lactase persistence genes.

Spinach, pepper (the spice kind), rhubarb, almonds, and more contain oxalate that can lead to kidney stone formation. Excess vitamin C does also. Increasing citrate intake helps prevent calcium kidney stone formation, but doesn't help with oxalate kidney stones as much.

The list of antinutrients is long. Don't overdo eating one "natural" ingredient or another because that's the greatest risk of becoming a Chubbyemu video subject.

Exactly. Nature is there mostly to kill you, that is only natural, and thinking otherwise is basically resorting to divine. No living being wants to be food. There can be symbiotic behavior and plants can produce certain chemicals that attract animals that do some things for them like helping reproduction, but its huge stretch to claim that evolution optimizes for health by proxy. Most off beneficial effects of plant chemicals are due to shared pathways and hormesis.

I was referring to the fruits which may contain a tiny amount of erythritol, not to your random list.

Can you go into detail about these substances?

Fruits have fiber, polyphenols, and rare sugars. I don't know which of these helps control the risk.

You are invoking a fallacy known as 'begging the question' in that statement because you never establish that any of those things control the risk, just that they exist in fruit.

Maybe the fiber helps?

Fiber is great for gut health but it's actually works against nutrient absorption. Increasing fiber intake requires increasing intake of certain vitamins, possibly with supplementation.

It's better to eat things in moderation and know what antinutrients are in what foods. There are tradeoffs.

Exactly. Fiber sucks up some nutrients so they are either pooped out due to limited digestibility of the colon, or get consumed by gut bacteria.

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