Artificial Sweeteners May Boost Blood Sugar, Study Finds

[Buster's Uncle]

Artificial Sweeteners May Boost Blood Sugar, Study Finds
LiveScience.com
By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer  36 minutes ago



People might consume artificial sweeteners because they think it will help them curb real-sugar consumption and prevent weight gain, but the chemicals may actually have an opposite effect. A new study has found that zero-calorie sweeteners may alter metabolism and increase blood-sugar levels, at least in mice and some people.

The negative effects of artificial sweeteners on metabolism seen in the study may have to do with how the sweeteners interact with the bacteria living the gut, the researchers said.

The results don't mean that eating sugar is healthier than consuming artificial sweeteners, study co-author Dr. Eran Elinav, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said at a news conference Tuesday (Sept. 16). However, the study does suggest that artificial sweeteners may be harmful, at least in some people, Elinav said.

In experiments, the scientists added an artificial sweetener — either saccharin, sucralose or aspartame — to mice's drinking water, and found the animals ended up having higher blood-sugar levels than the mice that drank sugar water, or just water. Saccharin is sold under the brand name Sweet'n Low, sucralose has the brand name Splenda and aspartame is found in NutraSweet, Equal and Spoonful brands.

The researchers also found that artificial sweeteners seemed to change the function of the gut bacteria in the rodents. When the researchers used antibiotics to suppress the bacteria, the differences in blood-sugar levels between groups of mice on different diets disappeared, according to the study, published today (Sept. 17) in the journal Nature.

Next, the researchers studied about 400 people, and found that the gut bacteria in people who consumed an artificial sweetener were different from the gut bacteria in the people who ate sugar. Participants who used artificial sweeteners also had higher blood-sugar levels than participants who used sugar.

"Artificial sweeteners were extensively introduced into our diets with the intention of reducing caloric intake and normalizing blood glucose levels without compromising the human 'sweet tooth,'" the researchers wrote in their study. "Our findings suggest that [artificial sweeteners] may have directly contributed to enhancing the exact [obesity] epidemic that they themselves were intended to fight."


Your personal gut bacteria

There are trillions of bacteria living in human guts. Collectively called the microbiome, these bacteria are crucial for the normal functioning of the intestines, and their composition could potentially influence diverse functions of the body. For example, previous studies have tied the balance of bacterial species in the gut to people's risk of conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

But people can have different compositions of bacterial species, and that could potentially contribute to how they respond to different foods, the researchers said.

In the study, the researchers also carried out another experiment. They added saccharin to diets of seven people who didn't normally consume sweeteners. After only four days, four of these participants showed increased levels of sugar in their blood and changes in the composition of their gut bacteria.

The gut bacteria composition of these participants differed from that of the other three participants, even before they consumed saccharin, the researchers found. This finding suggests that people may respond differently to artificial sweeteners depending on their gut-bacteria compositions, the researchers said.

"What was super striking and interesting to us was the fact that [people's] susceptibility to [the effects] of sweeteners could be predicted ahead of time, even before the individuals consumed the sweeteners," said study co-author Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

It's not clear how, exactly, changes in the bacterial species in the gut could contribute to increased blood-sugar levels, but scientists have some ideas. For example, it could be that the consumption of artificial sweeteners causes people to have more bacterial species that extract fat from the diet, which would contribute to obesity, said Taylor Feehley and Cathryn Nagler, researchers at the University of Chicago who wrote about the new study in the same journal.


Should you ditch the diet soda?

Previous studies have looked at whether people who replace sugar with artificial sweeteners have a lower risk of developing the health problems linked with consuming too much sugar, such as obesity and diabetes.

But although some studies found artificial sweeteners to be beneficial, others yielded mixed results, the researchers said. Some studies even found links between consuming sweeteners and a higher risk of obesity and high blood sugar, but those studies were observational (and didn't have randomized control groups), and it remains unclear whether artificial sweeteners may cause metabolism changes, or if people who are obese to begin with consume more of the sweeteners, Elinav said.

The new study is not conclusive, either. The results need to be confirmed in future research before recommendations about consuming artificial sweeteners can be made, the researchers said. Still, the findings should provoke discussion among the scientific, medical and public communities.

"By no means do we believe that based on the result of this study are we prepared to make recommendations as to the use and dosage of artificial sweeteners," Segal said. "We simply point to the immense body of experiments that we carried out both in humans and in mice. In


http://news.yahoo.com/artificial-sweeteners-may-boost-blood-sugar-study-finds-191557502.html

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Study asks whether artificial sweeteners may drive diabetes
Reuters
By Kate Kelland  3 hours ago



A person receives a test for diabetes during Care Harbor LA free medical clinic in Los Angeles, California September 11, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni



LONDON, Sept 17 (Reuters) - Scientists studying the effects of artificial sweeteners in mice and humans say they have found that eating them may increase the risk of developing glucose intolerance, a risk factor for diabetes.

In work that raises questions over whether artificial sweeteners - widely seen as "healthier" than sugars - should be reassessed, the researchers said the substances altered the balance of microbes in the gut linked to susceptibility to metabolic diseases like diabetes.

"In our studies we found that artificial sweeteners may drive, or contribute to... an exaggerated elevation in blood glucose levels - the very same condition that we often aim to prevent by consuming them," said Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who co-led the work.

Calorie-free artificial sweeteners are widely used in foods and drinks such as diet fizzy drinks or sodas and sugar-free yoghurts and desserts and are recommended for weight loss and for treatment or prevention of diabetes.

Nutrition and metabolism experts who were not involved in Elinav's studies said the results were intriguing, but were mainly focused on mice, were very preliminary and should not trigger changes in recommendations on so-called non-caloric artificial sweeteners (NAS).

"This research raises caution that NAS may not represent the ‘innocent magic bullet’ they were intended to be to help with the obesity and diabetes epidemics, but it does not yet provide sufficient evidence to alter public health and clinical practice," said Nita Forouhi, program leader at the Medical Research Council's epidemiology unit at Cambridge University.

Rates of obesity and diabetes are reaching epidemic proportions worldwide, and advice to cut down on sugar intake as part of a more healthy diet is often accompanied by recommendations to replace sugary drinks with "diet" or "light" versions that use artificial sweeteners instead.

Elinav's team conducted a series of experiments in both mice and humans, repeating them several times to check their results. They used three common artificial sweeteners - saccharin, sucralose or aspartame.

They found that mice whose drinking water was supplemented with glucose and a sweetener developed marked glucose intolerance compared with mice drinking water alone, or water with just sugar in it. The artificial sweeteners exert this effect by altering the balance of gut microbes, they said.


FINDINGS INCONCLUSIVE FOR HUMANS

Moving on to human studies, the researchers analyzed around 400 people and found that the gut bacteria in those who consumed artificial sweeteners was significantly different from those who did not. They also found NAS eaters had "markers" for diabetes, including raised blood sugar levels and glucose intolerance.

The scientists then put seven volunteers who did not normally consume artificial sweeteners on controlled 7-day diet of high NAS intake, and found that after only four days their blood glucose levels were up and the composition of their gut bacteria had also changed, mirroring the results in mice.

"These results indicate that non-caloric artificial sweeteners may exacerbate, rather than prevent, metabolic disorders such as glucose intolerance and diabetes," the team wrote in their study in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

Naveed Sattar, a professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow who had no direct involvement with Elinav's research, said the finding in the mice experiments was interesting "but we have to remember two important things":

"Animal data for many experiments do not show the same effect in humans, which can sometimes be quite the opposite," and "current epidemiological data in humans do not support a meaningful link between diet drinks and risk for diabetes, whereas sugar rich beverages do appear to be associated with higher diabetes risk."

"So, these findings would not make me choose sugary drinks over diet drinks," he said.

(Editing by Ralph Boulton)


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[Buster's Uncle]

Zero-calorie sweeteners may trigger blood sugar risk by screwing with gut bacteria
Artificial sweeteners don't have calories — so why are these mice getting fat?
The Verge
By Arielle Duhaime-Ross on September 17, 2014 01:22 pm



When artificial sweeteners are in the news, it’s rarely positive. In the last few years, sweeteners have been linked to everything from Type 2 diabetes to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, and stroke. Still, products like Splenda and Sweet‘N Low remain a cornerstone of many a weight-loss strategy, mostly because doctors don’t quite understand how sweeteners contribute to disease. That may soon change, however, as results from a study, published today in Nature, point to a possible mechanism behind these adverse health effects.
 
"Our results suggest that in a subset of individuals, artificial sweeteners may affect the composition and function of the gut microbiome" in a way that would lead to high blood-sugar levels, said Eran Elinav, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Health in Israel and a co-author of the study, during a press conference yesterday. This, the researchers say, is bad for human health because when sugar levels are high in the blood, the body can’t break it down, so it ends up being stored as fat.

To reach these conclusions, Elinav and his team first tested the effect of three common artificial sweeteners — aspartame, sucralose, saccharin — on rodents. They found that each of the sweeteners induced a change in blood sugar levels that surpassed that of the mice who consumed actual sugar. And later tests involving the main sweetening agent in Sweet‘N Low, saccharin, yielded similar results in both lean and obese mice.

But mammals don’t actually digest artificial sweeteners — that’s why they’re "calorie-free" — so the reasons why these mice were experiencing blood-glucose alterations was still mysterious, Elinav said. Still, the researchers had an idea: maybe the bacteria that lived in the guts of the mice were interacting with the sweeteners.

So the researchers performed several experiments to test their idea. In one, they gave antibiotics to mice who had been fed sweeteners regularly. Antibiotics kill gut bacteria, and when these mice had their microbial guests cleaned out, their blood sugar levels went back to normal. In another experiment, the scientists transplanted feces — a rich source of gut microbes — from sweetener-fed mice into rodents that had never consumed artificial sweeteners. The procedure caused the recipient mice to experience oddly high blood glucose, like the mice in the sweetener group. Finally, Elinav and his colleagues used genetic analysis to reveal that alterations in the composition of microbial colonies were also accompanied by changes in bacterial function — changes that could very well explain why the mice were experiencing such high blood sugar.

But findings in mice aren’t nearly as convincing as findings in people, so the researchers set out to investigate human sweetener consumption. In the first experiment, the researchers analyzed the blood-sugar levels and gut bacteria colonies of 381 participants. And, as expected, Elinav and his colleagues found that people who consumed sweeteners in large quantities also showed disturbances in several metabolic parameters — including increased weight — as well as distinct microbial changes in their guts.

The results from the second, much smaller human experiment might actually be the most illuminating.

"We followed for a single week a group of seven human volunteers who do not consume sweeteners as part of their normal diet," Elinav said. During that period, the researchers gave them a single dose of saccharin, and monitored their vitals. After just four days, half the participants showed microbial alterations and increases in blood sugar levels, he explained, "while the other subset had no meaningful effect immediately following the consumption of sweeteners."

In other words: some people are more susceptible to the effects of artificial sweetener than others.


A causal link

The handful of studies suggest that consuming non-caloric artificial sweeteners boosts the risk glucose intolerance in both humans and mice, as a result of changes in gut microbe function, the researchers wrote in their report. Yet, because of the preliminary nature of their results and the small number of human participants involved, they stopped short of suggesting that people change their eating habits. "By no means are we prepared to make recommendations as to the use and dosage of artificial sweeteners based on the results of this study," said Eran Segal, a study co-author also at the Weizmann Institute of Health.

Other researchers, however, were more forthcoming.

"People need to be much more mindful of what they are eating and drinking and make efforts to avoid products that have added sweeteners in any form" said Susan Swithers, a behavioral neuroscientist at Purdue University who wasn’t part of the Nature study, in an email to The Verge. The studies showed not only a causal link between the changes in the gut and artificial sweeteners, but that the observed changes happen quickly, she wrote.

Not everyone agrees with the design the researchers used to address the question about artificial sweeteners and weight gain. Christopher Gardner, a food scientist at Stanford University who didn’t participate in the study, says that the fact that the researchers gave the FDA's maximal acceptable daily intake of saccharin to the human participants — about 5 mg / kg body weight per day — isn’t ideal. In a real-life setting, that dose would be the equivalent to a 150-pound person consuming 42 12-ounce sodas per day, or 8.5 packets of pink Sweet 'n Low per day. "That may be ‘acceptable’ according to some set of guidelines," Gardner wrote in an email, "but it should be noted that realistically this is a very high dose they are using and one that wouldn't be consumed by a typical consumer."

Still, the idea that we might finally have an explanation for the adverse health effects seen in certain sweetener studies is worth paying attention to. Should the findings prove reproducible, doctors will be tasked with understanding why some people are susceptible to microbiome alterations, while others aren’t. And sweetener companies will have to address the criticism — in addition to rethinking their marketing strategies. "The work is important," Swithers said, "because it underscores the role that artificial sweeteners may play in contributing to the very problems they were designed to help."


http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/17/6338403/zero-calorie-blood-sugar-risk

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Research Shows Zero-Calorie Sweeteners Can Raise Blood Sugar
They Can Alter the Population of Gut Bacteria and Trigger Unwanted Changes
Wall Street Journal
By Gautam Naik  Sept. 17, 2014 7:21 p.m. ET



Sugar and sweetener packets. Getty Images/Tetra images RF



The artificial sweeteners in diet soda, yogurt and other foods consumed by millions can raise the blood sugar level instead of reducing it, according to new experiments in mice and people.

The provocative finding—made possible through a new avenue of research—is likely to stoke the simmering controversy over whether artificial sweeteners help or hinder people's ability to lose weight and lower their risk of diabetes.

The research shows that zero-calorie sweeteners such as saccharin, sucralose and aspartame can alter the population of bacteria in the gut and trigger unwanted changes such as higher blood glucose levels—a risk factor for diabetes.

"The scope of our discovery is cause for a public reassessment of the massive and unsupervised use of artificial sweeteners," said Eran Elinav, a physician and immunologist at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science and lead author of the study, which appeared Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Though many people consume artificial sweeteners instead of sugar to control their weight, the scientific evidence that they work is mixed. Some studies have indicated that the sweeteners can help lead to weight loss, while others suggest they contribute to weight gain.

One reason is that it isn't clear whether people who consume artificial sweeteners are overweight because of what they eat—or whether overweight people are the ones who typically gravitate to such products.

Based on existing evidence, guidelines jointly published in 2012 by the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association noted that artificial sweeteners "when used judiciously…could facilitate reductions in added sugar," and thus influence weight loss.

The new Nature study marks a significant advance because it brings together two separate areas of research—the role of sweeteners in raising blood sugar levels, and the complex workings of the vast colonies of bacteria that inhabit the gut. Individuals can have differing bacterial colonies in their gut, meaning people respond differently to what they consume.

In one experiment, the researchers found that mice whose diets included saccharin, sucralose or aspartame had significantly higher blood-glucose levels than mice whose diet included sugar, or no sugar at all.

They next wanted to test whether the fake sweeteners caused that metabolic change by altering the balance of microbes in the animals' gut.

They transplanted bacteria from artificial-sweetener-fed mice or sugar-fed mice into other mice that were bred to have no gut bacteria of their own and that had never consumed a sweetener product. They found that the bacterial transfer from the sweetener-fed mice raised the blood sugar levels in the transplant recipients—suggesting that the gut microbes had triggered the higher sugar levels in mice fed fake sweeteners.

Was the same link true for people? Dr. Elinav and his colleagues examined the relationship between long-term consumption of artificial sweeteners and various metabolic measurements in some 380 nondiabetic people.

They found that the bacteria in the gut of those who regularly ate fake sweeteners were notably different from those who didn't. In addition, there was a correlation between the sweetener consumption and a susceptibility to glucose intolerance, which is a disturbance in the blood glucose level.

Correlation, however, doesn't necessarily mean causation. In the next experiment, seven volunteers who normally didn't consume fake sugar were asked to consume products high in the sweeteners. After four days, four of them had significantly higher blood-sugar levels as well as altered populations of bacteria in their gut—an outcome similar to what was seen in mice.

"This susceptibility to sweeteners [can now] be predicted ahead of time by profiling the microbes in the people," said Eran Segal, a co-author of the study and computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute.

The results need to be corroborated through a study with many more participants.

In a statement, the Calorie Control Council, a trade group that represents makers of artificial sweeteners and other food products, said the Nature study suffered from several limitations. It said the results from the mouse experiments may not apply to humans, while the human experiments had a small sample size. It said further research was needed.

Researchers aren't sure about the exact mechanisms causing the imbalance in the gut bacteria populations. But they found that several types of bacteria that changed after the consumption of artificial sweeteners previously had been associated with Type 2 diabetes in humans.

The results appears to demonstrate that for some people, artificial sweeteners can alter the composition of gut bacteria in such a way that it may contribute to—rather than reduce—certain metabolic conditions related to obesity, such as glucose intolerance.

"We've been wondering why people who consume [artificial] sweeteners don't always lose weight," said Judy Wylie-Rosett, a nutrition expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who wasn't involved in the Nature research. "This is a very intriguing study because it's the first one that looks at gut microbes."

Artificial sweeteners have been around for more than a century. But no one thought to embark on this type of study before because scientists' understanding of how gut microbes respond to different foods and the metabolic changes they induce is still in its infancy.

Some 100 trillion microbes live in the human body. Together, they have at least 100 times as many genes as we do. Unlike the genes we are born with, those microbes can be easily manipulated via drugs or changes in diet. This knowledge has sparked a big push to understand the role of microbes in regulating human health.

The authors of the Nature study are now recruiting hundreds of volunteers for a much more ambitious study that will try to establish a link between gut bacteria, their responses to hundreds of common food products and the physical changes they induce in connection with obesity, diabetes and other diseases.


http://online.wsj.com/articles/research-shows-zero-calorie-sweeteners-can-raise-blood-sugar-1410973201?ru=yahoo?mod=yahoo_itp

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Sweeteners boost diabetes risk: study
Relaxnews
7 hours ago






Promoted as an aid to good health, artificial sweeteners may in fact be boosting diabetes risk, said a study Wednesday that urged a rethink of their widespread use and endorsement.

Also called non-calorific artificial sweeteners, or NAS, the additives are found in diet sodas, cereals and desserts -- a huge market for people worried about weight gain and sugar intake.

Some experts recommend NAS for people with Type 2 diabetes, a disease that has attained pandemic proportions, and for a pre-diabetic condition called glucose intolerance, with elevated blood-sugar levels.

After leaving a sensation of sweetness on the tongue, NAS molecules pass through the intestinal tract without being absorbed.

This explains why, unlike sugar, they add negligibly, if at all, to the calorie count.

But scientists reported in the journal Nature that experiments on lab mice and a small group of humans found NAS disrupted the makeup and function of gut bacteria, and actually hastened glucose intolerance.

"Artificial sweeteners were extensively introduced into our diets with the intention of reducing caloric intake and normalising blood glucose levels without compromising the human 'sweet tooth'," the paper said.

"Our findings suggest that NAS may have directly contributed to enhancing the exact epidemic that they themselves were intended to fight," it said bluntly.

Scientists led by Eran Elinav and Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel added three commonly-used types of NAS -- aspartame, sucralose or saccharin -- to the drinking water of mice in body-size appropriate doses equivalent to recommended maximum human intake.

Those rodents given NAS developed glucose intolerance, whereas mice that drank only water, or water with sugar, did not.

Next, the researchers transplanted faeces from NAS-fed and glucose-fed mice into rodents bred to have no gut bacteria of their own.

The blood-glucose levels of the NAS transplant recipients rose sharply, the team found -- and their gut bacteria worked harder than the other group's at extracting glucose from nutrients.

The next step was to apply these insights to humans.

Poring over questionnaires and health data from 381 non-diabetic people, the team found a "significant" link between glucose intolerance and higher NAS consumption.

Finally, the researchers placed seven volunteers who did not normally use NAS on a seven-day regimen that included the maximum sweetener intake recommended by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Within five to seven days, four developed elevated blood-glucose levels and an altered gut bacteria mix, apparently mirroring the effect in mice.


- Demand for a review -

Past investigations into NAS have delivered mixed results. Some showed benefits in weight loss and glucose tolerance, while others suggested the opposite.

The picture is muddied by the fact that many NAS consumers are people who already have diabetes or are prone to it.

The new experiments are a red flag, the team said.

"This calls for a reassessment of today's massive, unsupervised consumption of these substances," said Elinav.

Independent commentators praised the work for its innovation, but warned against overreaction.

The human trial involved just seven people over a week, and wider and longer trials are needed to draw any firm conclusion, they said.

"Human diets are complex, consisting of many foods, the consumption of which can vary in amounts, and over time," warned John Menzies of the Centre for Integrative Physiology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

"This research raises caution that NAS may not represent the 'innocent magic bullet' they were intended to be to help with the obesity and diabetes epidemics," Nita Forouhi, a University of Cambridge epidemiologist told Britain's Science Media Centre.

"But it does not yet provide sufficient evidence to alter public health and clinical practice."


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