John Myers
Sweeteners are said to prevent obesity and make it easier to lose weight. But do they really? Israeli researchers discovered that various sweeteners massively change the intestinal flora. However, these changes can lead to obesity and impaired glucose metabolism.
Sweeteners as a sugar substitute?
If you want to lose weight, you should consume as little sugar as possible. Because many still do not want to do without sweets, they resort to artificial sweeteners or products that contain such sweeteners.
Numerous so-called “diet” products even contain several sweeteners at the same time. Diet Coke, for example, contains a sweetener combination of aspartame, acesulfame, and cyclamate.
Of course, doctors and nutrition experts often advise diabetics to replace sugar with sweeteners.
Since sweeteners are hardly metabolized and therefore usually do not pass through the intestinal mucosa, they do not get into the bloodstream. From this, it was concluded that sweeteners could not cause any damage to the organism.
But that’s not true, as an Israeli research team has now found in a multi-part study.
Sweeteners increase the risk of diabetes
dr Eran Elinav and Prof. Eran Segal from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot/Israel discovered that sweeteners increase body weight and disrupt glucose metabolism. These, in turn, are the first steps toward diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
The latter consists of four common symptoms: obesity, elevated blood sugar, blood fat levels, and high blood pressure.
For the first experiment, they added one of the following sweeteners to the drinking water of three groups of mice for eleven weeks: saccharin (E 954), sucralose (E 955), or aspartame (E 951).
A fourth group was given sugar water to drink. The fifth group represented the control group and drank pure water.
The sweetener mice had the highest glucose level (= blood sugar level) at the end. Their blood sugar levels were even higher than the blood sugar levels of the mice that drank sugar water.
Sweeteners change the intestinal flora
This led the scientists to the conclusion that the intestinal flora had to play a role in this process.
They were able to prove this by treating the mice with antibiotics, which initially killed the intestinal flora. After that, the sweeteners could no longer cause disturbances in glucose metabolism.
Next, they transplanted the gut flora (i.e., feces) from mice that had been given artificial sweetener into mice that had not yet been exposed to artificial sweetener. It turned out that the disturbed glucose metabolism was also transmitted to the other mice.
Sweeteners make you fat
An analysis of the intestinal flora showed that sweeteners led to a changed bacterial composition.
The mice that had been given sweeteners had a particularly large number of bacteria in their intestines that broke down long-chain carbohydrates into sugar or formed short-chain fatty acids.
However, both sugar and short-chain fatty acids lead to obesity in excessive amounts.
dr However, Elinav and his team not only analyzed the behavior of the mouse intestinal flora to sweeteners but also the data from 381 (still) healthy people.
Those study participants who stated that they regularly consumed sweeteners not only weighed more. Their glucose metabolism and intestinal flora were also disturbed.
Seven volunteers then agreed to take the maximum amount of the sweetener saccharin specified by the US Food Administration. After just one week, four of them developed impaired glucose metabolism.
These results were also reflected in the stool samples from the test persons: The four test persons whose glucose metabolism was disturbed also showed changes in the intestinal flora.
Sweeteners: health risk from the laboratory
Most sweeteners are developed in laboratories, they are man-made chemical substances.
They are commercially available as a sugar substitute but are also added to numerous foods. They are particularly common in convenience foods and so-called “diet” products.
In the list of ingredients, you can recognize sweeteners by the abbreviations E 950 to E 962.
Despite a growing body of research proving the opposite, countless nutritionists and even scientific institutes continue to claim that synthetic sweeteners are perfectly safe and can be incorporated into a healthy diet.
Healthy Sugar
Anyone who wants to lose weight or reduce their risk of diabetes should therefore under no circumstances resort to artificial sweeteners or products that contain such sweeteners.
A diet free of isolated carbohydrates (sugar, white flour) is the only way to keep blood glucose levels low in a healthy and sustainable manner.
