Erythritol May Damage Critical Brain Barrier, Risking Stroke | Hacker News Reader

Erythritol May Damage Critical Brain Barrier, Risking Stroke

sciencealert.com

32 pointsGaishan17 comments

"Erythritol linked to brain cell damage and stroke risk" (2025-07) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621268#44641500 :

> What percentage of cardiovascular "plaque" is sugar alcohol and thus apparently treatable with β or α cyclodextrin, in controls and patients with conditions like Arteriosclerosis and Atherosclerosis?

~20 years ago I bought a 50 Lb. bulk bag of Erythritol directly from Cargill.

Over the next decade I consumed the whole bag, most of it mixed into plain yogurt.

Now I wonder if my brain is damaged, or I am susceptible to stroke.

The article says it damages the blood-brain barrier, not the brain. A damaged blood-brain barrier increases the chances of illnesses and drugs affecting the brain, but in and off itself damaging the blood-brain barrier doesn't directly damage the brain.

Less “may” and more “medical consensus is that it absolutely does”. This is actually quite well studied.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44623976

Edit, feeding the sea-lion: Cleveland Clinic has called for a re-evaluation of erythritol's "GRAS" status:

> the present findings suggest that discussion of whether erythritol should be reevaluated as a food additive with the Generally Recognized as Safe designation is warranted.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/ATVBAHA.124.321...

> erythritol may not be as safe as currently classified by food regulatory agencies and should be reevaluated as an ingredient

https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2024/08/08/cleveland-cl...

>medical consensus is that it absolutely does

If it's actually "medical consensus", you'd find government agencies or professional organizations calling for bans, at least making announcements that it's harmful.

edit:

in response to OP's edit, I'm still not satisfied given that the statement is to call for its GRAS status to be reevaluated, when I specifically mentioned "announcements that it's harmful". At best that's "medical consensus" for "GRAS status should be reevaluated", not "medical consensus is that it absolutely [harmful]".

Sure. "Scientific" consensus then.

That just shifts the problem around. Where's your evidence that there's a "Scientific consensus"? So far as I can tell there's only two studies, a in-vitro one (ie. the OP) and a cohort study from 2023. If an in-vitro study and a cohort study are all you need to claim it's "quite well studied" and that there's a "consensus", I think your bar is awfully low. On the second page of HN there's a story where some is commenting that mRNA vaccines cause heart issues, citing one study, and I'm sure that the vaccines quacks have more studies than just that one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969206

I don’t think you searched at all. I’ll come back later with links, but maybe you could search a bit harder in the meantime. I’ve read dozens personally. The link in my top level comment (to another HN thread) will link you to 4 related studies and I walk through some of the logic behind how they choose their methodologies. You’re really leaning hard into the sea-lioning trope.

Here’s the link again for anyone else who completely missed it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44623976

For those who actually have any level of intellectual curiosity in this, that should get you started on some of the central research.

>Here’s the link again for anyone else who completely missed it:

Going through the links you provided:

[0] Berry 2025: the in vitro study from OP that I mentioned earlier

[1] Witkowski 2023: the 2023 cohort study that I mentioned earlier

[2] Witkowski 2024: study that found ingesting erythritol "enhances platelet reactivity in healthy volunteers". It doesn't attempt to prove that it actually causes negative health outcomes, but it does speculate that "may enhance thrombosis potential". I'm not sure how reliable that speculation is, given that the study doesn't say (at least in the abstract) whether "platelet reactivity" is an accepted proxy for thrombosis" (eg. similar to cholesterol is an accepted proxy for CVD). It concludes "discussion of whether erythritol should be reevaluated as a food additive with the Generally Recognized as Safe designation is warranted". Again, at best this is consistent with "there's a consensus that we should look into erythritol", not "there's a consensus that erythritol is harmful"

[3] This is just a blog that links to Witkowski 2024.

So in conclusion, you have 1 cohort study, 1 in vitro study, and 1 in-vivo study. I await your "dozens" of studies.

>You’re really leaning hard into the sea-lioning trope.

So what's the implication here? That anyone can make spurious claims about there being a "medical consensus" on some controversial topic, drop a few studies, and then when there's people pushing back denounce them as "sea-lioning"? If we adopted this attitude we'd still be proclaiming that there was a "medical consensus" that ivermectin cured covid, and I can actually turn up more than 3 studies for that[1].

[1] https://c19early.org/imeta.html

Thank you. In review, I have realized that a lot of the sources I read over the past year were just official-sounding perspectives on the same limited number of studies.

Not the person you were replying to but I do not have that level of confidence in governing agencies. Money corrupts. There are still a myriad of dangerous substances in use today that are known to be harmful.

As a side note if I consume more than 15G of erythritol I will start to see rainbows. I learned that by mistake of consuming a coconut drink that had 15G which seems like a lot to me. I reproduced it multiple times to confirm. I am not alone, found others that experience the same things.

Search for "artificial sweeteners migraine" or "artificial sweeteners migraine visual aura"

>Not the person you were replying to but I do not have that level of confidence in governing agencies. Money corrupts. There are still a myriad of dangerous substances in use today that are known to be harmful.

That's why I also said "at least making announcements that it's harmful". What substances do you think are actually harmful, but professional associations have refused to denounce it as such? Moreover if the claim is that it's "medical consensus" that it's harmful, how can layperson verify this, instead of relying on some guy confidently proclaiming as such on a HN comment?

There are entire communities dedicated to finding harmful substances outside of the "medical consensus". HN writes them off as quacks and I see those people on HN as trusting dogmatic scientism which to me is true quackery and why I avoid going into the weeds on such topics. If there are clues that something is bad I just get the f&$k away from it until a few hundreds years of testing have concluded which I see as common sense. It is also too difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff on HN as there are too many contrarians and people with financial conflicts of interest.

> If there are clues that something is bad I just get the f&$k away from it until a few hundreds years of testing have concluded which I see as common sense.

That's all fine. You might have a different risk profile. You might think the scientists have been captured by industry or whatever. You can even say "[x] is harmful". Where you get into trouble is when you go around claiming "medical consensus" or whatever, when such consensus clearly doesn't exist.

Where you get into trouble is when you go around claiming "medical consensus" or whatever, when such consensus clearly doesn't exist.

I agree with this. I am not waiting for governmental bodies to say something is good or bad for me.

Utterly brainwashed take only deserving of mockery.

Does the BBB recover after you stop consuming erythritol?

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