Could Artificial Sweeteners Be Making You Fat And Sick?
Fake sugar can cause short-term digestive problems, long-term gut dysbiosis, adverse cardiovascular events, and spike blood sugar
“See you in hell, Haribo Sugar-Free Gummi Bears” reads a popular Amazon review of the German gummy candies. They are sweetened with maltitol, a low-calorie type of sugar alcohol.
I know the exact type of hell sugar-free gummy bear reviewers are talking about. Years ago, I received a large tray of Sorbee candies at work. They were sweetened with sorbitol, a similar sugar alcohol to maltitol.
“This candy has no calories. We can eat as much as we want!” I told my best friend. We ate greedily throughout that morning. By the afternoon, both of us were miserable with severe stomach cramps and diarrhea.
We can still crack each other up by looking at each other and saying, “Sorbee sickness.”
In addition to Sorbee sorbitol and gummy bear maltitol, other sugar alcohol sweeteners include erythritol, lactitol, mannitol, xylitol, isomalt, and hydrogenated starch hydrolysates (HSH). These food and beverage sweeteners contain anywhere from 70% to 30% fewer calories per gram than sugar. They are used to reduce food calories. They also also permit manufacturers to call products “sugar-free.”
The intestinal upset resulting from eating more than a small amount of sugar alcohols derives from bacterial fermentation in our lower intestines. The fermentation releases gas and can also cause cramping and diarrhea.
“How much is too much” of these substitute sweeteners? While the answer will vary from person to person, the Cleveland Clinic says “studies have shown that consuming 10 to 15 grams of sugar alcohol is safe.”
Most of us aren’t accustomed to measuring our intake of any food additive in grams. You can easily exceed 15 grams of sugar alcohol if you chew five pieces of sugar-free gum and eat a couple of pieces of sugar-free candy.
Dentyne Ice, for example, has two grams of sorbitol and maltitol per 2-piece, 3-gram serving. This gum also contains other non-nutrient ingredients like candelilla wax, lecithin, and other artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose.
Longer-Term Effects Of Sugar Alcohols
At the time my best friend and I were gobbling delicious, violent illness-causing candies, we were also heavy consumers of diet soda. Although we were still in our late 20s, we were already on the road to …
I can’t prove causation, but I can correlate my unwanted adult weight gain with my decade-long diet soda and Sorbee Sickness phase. Granted, I was also pregnant, and for years thereafter, I worked in high-pressure jobs with long commutes. Like everyone in a similar position, I did turn to fast food and prepared foods more often than I should have.
Yet even with these factors taken into consideration, I started to wonder if the obvious short-term digestive distress from sugar alcohols might have some relationship to long-term gut dysbiosis that can be associated with conditions like IBS, along with overweight, obesity, and related metabolic illnesses.
Millions of people don’t know that they have a population of trillions of microbes in their gut microbiome, and even if they do know they have one, they may not know that it can influence their weight, mental health, skin health, Alzheimer’s disease risk, and immune system. A decade ago, Jotham Suez, currently a researcher with Johns Hopkins University and leader of the Suez Lab on the Microbiome, researched the effect of artificial sugar alternatives on obesity and metabolic illness. Suez found that these additives affected the intestinal bacteria of mice, along with fat storage, metabolism, and appetite.
Predictably, there was a strong food and biochemical industry pushback on Dr. Suez’ research that continues today. Yet his lab and a growing number of others have begun to uncover negative health effects of nearly every sugar substitute, from older varieties like saccharin to more recently popular ones like erythritol.
Erythritol And Adverse Cardiovascular Events
In February 2023, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic published results of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded study of over 1,000 people that found that “elevated levels of erythritol and several related artificial sweeteners were associated with the risk for cardiovascular events,” including nonfatal strokes and heart attacks as well as deadly ones. People with the highest levels of erythritol and similar sugar alcohols were twice as likely to have heart attacks or strokes after three years of follow-up as those with in the bottom 25% of levels tracked by the study.
Cleveland Clinic’s researchers have theorized that erythritol affects blood clotting. They discovered that erythritol caused blood platelets to clot and sped up clot formation and artery blockage in mice. In humans, they found that erythritol levels increased 1,000-fold and remained elevated for several days after subjects drank an erythritol-sweetened beverage.
Sugar Substitutes Are Associated With Weight Gain
Although diabetics and many others who are trying to lose weight substitute sugar-free foods for caloric sweeteners, many large population studies conducted over the past two decades show that people who consume artificial sweeteners consistently have higher BMIs than individuals who do not consume them.
In response to the evidence that people who drink diet soda typically have a higher BMI and more belly fat than others, the manufacturers of artificial sweeteners and the prepared food industry have theorized for years that people who drink artificially sweetened diet sodas respond by “eating more calories.”
This assertion can be found in dozens of media articles, yet evidence for it is quite weak and most studies can easily be tracked back to food industry consortia and funders. Instead, there is a growing body of evidence that artificial sweeteners directly cause a variety of effects on digestion and metabolism.
Both sucralose (Splenda) and saccharin, two of the best-known and most frequently used artificial sweeteners, have been proven to increase blood glucose.
Researchers call artificial sweeteners non-nutritive artificial sweeteners (NAS). Research is underway to discover the exact effects of NAS on the human microbiome. According to the Suez Lab at Johns Hopkins University, “animal study evidence is overwhelming that NAS affect the microbiome.”
When my best friend and I ate sorbitol-laden candy, we experienced direct, overwhelming evidence that this stuff not only didn’t taste as good as real candy, it made us very sick.
With the help of DNA sequencing and other advanced research techniques, scientists are now discovering that artificial sweeteners not only cause short-term digestive pain, they can also have the potential to lead to many undesirable long-term negative health effects.
Xylitol is a notable exception, as it's been proven to dissolve biofilms. This beneficial property has made a huge difference in turning my health around. It can cause stomach upset if consuming a lot at once.