Nature: A health lie about sweeteners

artificial sweeteners mainly refer to chemicals that are sweet but not sugary. Saccharin, stevia, glycol, aspartol... These are the most common artificial sweeteners, and people who usually pay attention to the food ingredients list are no strangers to these names.However, now researchers have confirmed that these artificial sweeteners, widely marketed as helping to lose weight and prevent diabetes, actually promote poor glucose tolerance and metabolic disease formation; The researchers published the results from experiments in mice and humans in today'
journal nature
Nature.Dr.
Elinav
, of the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of
, and Professor
Segal
of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics led the study.
the widespread use
artificial sweeteners in beverages and foods may have contributed to obesity and diabetes sweeping the world," said Elinav
of the Study Group. Foryear, researchers have been puzzled that calorie-free artificial sweeteners don't seem to help with weight loss, and some studies have shown that they have even had the opposite effect.



and
Gili Zilberman-Shapira
, in collaboration with
graduate students
Tal Korem
and
David Zeevi
of Elin
av
Labs, found that even without sugar, artificial sweeteners had a direct impact on the body's ability to use glucose. Glucose tolerance is often thought to occur when the body is unable to cope with large amounts of sugar in the diet, which is the first step on the road to metabolic syndrome and adult diabetes.scientists added

most commonly used artificial sweeteners to the water fed to mice, according to a comparable amount approved by the FDA. Compared to mice with drinking water or even sugary water, these mice developed poor glucose tolerance. Repeating the experiment in different types of mice and different doses of sweeteners, the researchers still got the same results -- these substances somehow induced poor glucose tolerance., the researchers tested the hypothesis that intestinal bacteria are associated with this phenomenon. They argue that the body itself may not recognize new substances such as artificial sweeteners as "food" and that bacteria may have responded to them. In fact, artificial sweeteners are not actually absorbed by the gastrointestinal tract, but they encounter trillions of bacteria in the gut bacterium as they pass through the gastrointestinal tract.used antibiotics to treat mice to remove many of their gut bacteria; this completely reversed the effects of artificial sweeteners on glucose metabolism. Next, they transferred the bacteria from mice that ate artificial sweeteners to "sterile" mice, and the result was a complete transmission of poor glucose tolerance to the mice. This provides clear evidence that changes in gut bacteria directly lead to harmful effects on host metabolism.the team even found that adding artificial sweeteners to the body to grow bacteria was enough to induce sterile mice to develop poor glucose tolerance. A detailed analysis of the characteristics of these mouse bacteria revealed that their bacteria have undergone significant changes.the human microbiome work in the same way?
Elinav
and
Segal
tested it in one way or another. As a first step, they studied collecting data from their individualized nutrition programs. The program is the largest human trial to date to study the relationship between nutrients and bacteria. Here, they found a significant association between self-reported consumption of artificial sweeteners, individual gut bacterial composition, and poor glucose tolerance. They then completed a controlled trial in which a group of volunteers who usually didn't eat or drink foods with artificial sweeteners ate them for a week, and the researchers tested the volunteers' blood sugar levels and gut bacteria., many , but not all, volunteers began to develop poor glucose tolerance just a week after eating artificial sweeteners. The composition of their gut bacteria could explain the difference: the researchers found two different human gut bacteria -- one that induced poor glucose tolerance when exposed to artificial sweeteners and the other had no effect.
Elinav
believes that volunteers who developed poor glucose tolerance responded to these chemical sweeteners by secreting substances that caused inflammatory reactions similar to excess sugar, which led to changes in the body's ability to use sugar."Our results
the importance of individual medicine and nutrition for our overall health," Segal said. We believe that a comprehensive analysis of 'a large amount of individualized data' and eating habits from our genomes, microbiomes, has the potential to change our understanding of the mechanisms by which food and nutritional supplements affect individual health and disease risk. Elinavsaid
"Our relationship to our gut microbiosis is a big factor in determining how the foods we eat affect us. Of particular ability to find a link between artificial sweeteners and the tendency to specifically use them to prevent some diseases is found; ”