Sweetness

Are artificial sweeteners, those things that are supposed to replace sugar and keep your blood sugar lower, the very dirt-bags that are making your blood sugar harder to control?

A research study written up in Nature (nature.com) indicates the consumption of artificial sweeteners can alter your intestinal micro-organisms.  Those lovely little bugs that keep our body healthy by warding off invaders, etc.  The use of mice helped researchers to determine that there were indeed changes occurring in the intestine that were leading to glucose intolerance (that sneaky little insulin resistance sign that diabetes is on the horizon).

How did they figure that out?  It's interesting to those of us who love science, but the gist of it is this...  They took some mice and gave them some sweet drinks (that contained either aspartame, sucralose, or saccharin).  Note that they weren't getting huge doses, they were drinking amounts comparable to the upper limit for these artificial sweeteners as determined by the FDA (Food & Drug Administration).  They were then fed a regular diet or a high fat one - and no differences between the groups was found.  The mice who drank the sweet drinks then had some of their intestinal micro-organisms transplanted into mice that never had the drinks - and the glucose intolerance continued for those mice too.  The effect of the artificial sweeteners was reduced when antibiotics were introduced (because antibiotics will often kill the good and the bad bacteria in the intestine) - so introduce something to kill the bacteria off, and you see less of the glucose intolerance effect.

The researchers found that certain pathways - those found in abundance in those with glucose intolerance - were being over-represented in those mice drinking the artificially sweetened water. 

The tough part is determining whether or not the same results would show up for humans, because although we are mammals just like the mice, our body's are not exactly the same in the way we respond to things in our diet and environment.  While studies to demonstrate our response haven't been done just yet, a small pilot study may show a hint at what would occur on a larger scale.  7 individuals who were essentially artificial sweetener-naïve (the did not routinely consume saccharin, sucralose or aspartame) were given saccharin for almost a week at a level as high as the FDA's upper limit recommendation.  4 of the participants showed impairment in glucose tolerance, while the other 3 showed no improvement.  Certainly the number of participants wasn't high enough to state that 1/2 of people would showed impaired glucose tolerance, but the whole reason for those with insulin resistance, or diabetes, using the artificial sweetener is to improve their blood sugar control... and clearly that isn't what's happening.

Really interesting results.  It furthers my thought process that we just need to stop looking for an easy fix (replace "natural X" with "artificial X" and your health problem is solved) and simply move back to eating regular foods just with more attention to portion sizes.  So this would mean that instead of someone with diabetes, or insulin resistance, opting for a diet soda over the regular soda... perhaps we just forego the soda altogether!  Or instead of opting to eat the sweet dessert made with sucralose, we instead just make a different type of dessert or have a tiny portion of the one made with sugar.

P.S.  And after reading this research article, I have yet another item to scour the grocery store looking for so I can be sure not to bring it into my home ever again.

Suez J, Korem T, Zeevi D, Zilberman-Schapira G, Thaiss CA, Maza O, et al.  Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota. Nature. 2014.  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13793.html