5d ago

Popular Artificial Sweetener Linked to Higher Risk of Strokes

www.newsweek.com

Popular artificial sweetener linked to higher risk of strokes

From low-carb ice cream and keto protein bars to "sugar-free" soda, the artificial sweetener erythritol has become a staple for anyone trying to cut calories or carbs.

However, new research suggests the popular sugar substitute may come with serious downsides—including changes in brain blood vessels that could increase the risk of stroke.

27 comments

"...linked to higher risk of strokes."
No. To link it to a higher risk of strokes, you would need to find more strokes than expected in people consuming it vs those who don't, after accounting for confounding factors.
What this study found was that human cerebral microvascular endothelial cells in culture change gene expression when exposed to the sweetener.
Prior studies suggest an epidemiological link to strokes, but the way this is reported is trash.
Erythritol.
Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40459966/
It's a fucking clickbait to not include the name of the sweetener
- Newsweek isn't great. It's a sugar alcohol, Erythritol
  
  Damn, I used it in my cider. Gotta read up on this
- It is included though?
Personal gripe but I've never agreed with the term artificial sweetener, they are genuinely sweet, is it because they aren't sucrose/fructose/glucose?
Either way I remember reading about Erythritol from a study on nature.com a while ago. It's one of the unfortunate low-caloric sweeteners that are still linked to obesity and all the problems related to that condition. Best avoided to be on the safe side.
- Non-nutritive sweetener is the more correct name for it, since some are somewhat natural, like stevia.
  Sorbitol (the one that’s famous for releasing hellspawn from your anus when you eat to many sugar free gummy bears) is actually naturally occurring in small quantities in most fruits and larger quantities in prunes (why they make you poop).
  
  Thank you for that colourfully described nugget of information. Username checks out...
- They aren't artificially sweet, they are a sweetener that is artificial (man-made). As opposed to natural sweeteners that you can just grab from nature.
- My personal experience is that eating sweets makes me crave more sweets, artificial sweetener or not.
At some point it would turn out that the original sin, aspartame, is the least bad of them all.
- Wouldn't the original sin be sugar?
  
  Hm, I guess. 😄
- astpartame is one of the most intensely studied additives and the worst they can come up with is "it might slightly raise the risk of cancer", which also applies to being on an airplane.
  
  Yeah, which is why I prefer it to any of the much less studied alternatives, if I have to use artificial sweetener. It's funny how that works.
Erythritol, like other sugar alcohols, is also bad for folks with IBS. And it seems like they're in everything.
This has been known for a little bit. The good news is I’ve seen several products drop the ingredient already.

27 comments