Artificial sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of aging

theguardian.com

6 pointsOutOfHere4 comments

Study: https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000214023

From the abstract:

> Consumption of aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame k, erythritol, sorbitol, and xylitol was associated with a faster decline in global cognition, particularly in memory and verbal fluency domains.

These findings do NOT apply to tagatose, stevia, or mogroside.

> These findings do NOT apply to tagatose, stevia, or mogroside

I think it's important to call out the difference between "did not find a correlation" versus "did not look".

Tagatose is listed as part of their questionnaire, but not stevia or mogroside.

> these are natural sweeteners

Xylitol is also a natural sweetener, so it is at best premature to adopt a natural-versus-unnatural framing from these results.

What about sucralose, another widely used artificial sweetener?

Avoid it because it disrupts the gut microbiota to harm immune cell function. Refer to https://doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-25-0247

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