Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/rese...ugar-1410973201

I am more interested in Micros and Glycogen.
So for a micros life changing diet, one can lose 10+lbs weight in a couple days(also gain 10+lbs weight in a couple days.)
Example, a person in Vegan Carb diet is switched to a Top Sirloin Steak ONLY diet plus coffee+sweetener+butter.
I would say 5 days 10+ lbs.
Unfortunately, those lbs are glycogen+water and Micros.

My humble opinion? This is way too much media attention paid to a very small study.

The most intriguing aspect for me is the research now just beginning (or at least picking up speed) in the study of gut bacteria, the microbiome. I've read that this area of investigation has opened up thanks to technologies pioneered in genetic research.

About time! I mean, microbes were the earliest biological inhabitants of the planet. For all we know, everything that lives (and a few substances we don't consider living) exists to host the future of the microbe population. I'll try to be nice to my four pounds of the wee beasties.

Personally, I've cut my AS consumption, never high to begin with, down to the occasional use in a cocktail beverage or tall glass of limeade in the summer.

I discovered that since healing my gut with gluten-free, I have terrible cramps with even small amounts of the usual suspects, and a bit of Truvia seems to avoid that. (Half a packet per beverage.)

Fiber disturbs my digestion now... I must use smaller portions of high fiber vegetables. So I can say my gut biome must have changed, and fiber just doesn't agree with me. That could be the problems with some forms of AS.

Mountain meet molehill.

Your gut biome changes with every meal. Changing from high carb to low carb will affect a tremendous change in your biome. All those various bugs in the gut have specific things they eat and if you stop eating those things then they starve to death.

Taking NSAIDs changes your gut. Probably a TON of stuff does that hasn't ever been studied. So I can't quite see how they can take one thing and be all shocked and amazed it changed the gut biome.

Shoot, don't coconut oil, oregano and honey have anti-bacterial qualities? What do they do to the gut biome which is... bacteria and other stuff?

Coconut oil: Yup — it's half lauric acid. The body converts it to monolaurin, which has anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-fungal properties. There's even a commercial preparation of monolaurin: Lauricidin. It's one of the tools in a naturopath's arsenal to combat SIBO, among other ills. I don't know how the body deploys the monolaurin to target only foreign microbes, though.

Oregano: Only oil of oregano is a broad-spectrum anti-microbial. It's one of the tools in a naturopath's arsenal to combat SIBO, among other ills. It's as potent as pharmaceutical antibiotics.

Honey: It's the bits of the Manuka plant in Manuka honey that have anti-bacterial properties. I'm unsure if other honeys have anti-bacterial agents.

This was a study on mice and used commercially available sweeteners that have as the first ingredient dextrose which is, you guessed it, sugar. They used both sweet and low and aspartame, both of which I do not advocate but notice they have lumped two totally different artificial sweeteners together in the same study and with added ingredients. Wasn't the study hypothesis to test changes in gut microbiota as a result of sweeteners? I don't follow the statement that the changes in microbiota were the same as well documented in obesity. Am I missing that report?

In almost all the research reported by the American Diabetes Association there is no rise in blood glucose following artificial sweeteners. The research I have read generally talks about one sweetener at a time as they are all remarkably different. In the case of Stevia there is both a positive blood glucose and blood pressure response. I’ve even done anecdotal research by testing my blood glucose levels following eating ‘artificial’ sweeteners being careful to distinguish between Stevia, sucralose, and Erithrytol; only eating pure forms, and not eating genetically modified forms. Add to this that all artificial sweeteners work completely differently from one another and that they have additives like dextrose that may alter the results. And this was a mice study.

However, microbe health is very topical right now and to be on the safe side I do take a probiotic, without starches added, daily.

They did include a small study--was it eight people?--where artificial sweetener is supposed to have worsened glucose tolerance, and caused a shift in the gut biome. A gut bacteria transplant into some germ free mice was done, and the mice that got bacteria from people whose glucose tolerance worsened also experienced a worsening. But, there's no way to tell from the articles written about the study, or the abstract of the study, the real world significance here. Did glucose go up enough to matter? Who knows? To find statistical significance in such a small group, I guess glucose tolerance must have gotten a fair bit worse, but that's just me guessing.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journa...m_medium=tumblr

That's the study. Can anybody with access let us know what's going on?

Driving myself a little nuts staring at the teeny little graphs in the "figures at a glance."

edited to add--seven people, four "responded," three didn't.

Most of the article is on the mice they fed saccharin, splenda & aspartame to and found that saccharin had the biggest effect. Then they asked 40 long-term high-AS users and 236 non-AS consumers (all non-diabetic) to fill out food frequency questionnaires and found a positive correlation between AS consumption and metabolic-syndrome-related clinical parameters such as higher weight and waist-to-hip ratio; higher fasting blood glucose; higher glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1C%), indicative of glucose concentration over the previous 3 months. The way I read this is that fat people are more likely to consume artificial sweeteners than healthy thin people, and I would guess that ASs in the diet are not the only difference between what they ate.

To do an initial assessment of whether human AS consumption causes blood glucose tolerance problems, they followed SEVEN healthy volunteers (5 males and 2 females, aged 28–36) who do not normally consume artificially sweetened foods for only 1 week, during which they were fed the FDA's maximum safe saccharin level (5 mg per kg body weight). They claim "most" individuals (4 out of 7) developed significantly poorer glycemic response. The other three had no change in glucose tolerance. The way I read this is that there may be a ~50/50 chance that maximum levels of saccharin would affect a healthy person's glucose tolerance. How many people consume saccharin any more? I don't think I've had any since the 1970s, and I found it bitter, so never consumed anywhere near 5 mg per kg. Studies on <30 subjects are not statistically significant and there is no mention of what else the 7 people ate or whether they even ate the same foods with their saccharin doses. Since the article only mentions the saccharin doses they gave the 7 people they "followed", I suspect they merely added the saccharin doses to what these individually normally ate, and their glucose responses may have been related to the other stuff they ate.

It appears that the gut biota were only studied in the mice, not the humans. As Nancy said, anything you consume can affect the gut biome, so it is not surprising that maximum levels of saccharin would too.

Yeah. Here's the thing. Suppose high dose artificial sweeteners, higher than most people would ever use, does cause diabetes at that dose. They claim to have found "evidence" of this in the decreased glucose tolerance in four out of seven subjects. They pair this with epidemiology, and with rodent studies, where they're allowed to go further--allowed to try to make the animals as sick as possible. The biggest problem is the epidemiology, in my book. They've put the evidence together in such a way to suggest that what happens to the people and the mice in the intervention studies is what happened to the free-living humans in the observational study.

Not only is it possible that fat people are more likely to consume artificial sweeteners. It's also possible that the causation is reversed--the person being driven to consume sweet things, whether sugar or sugar substitute. Before his nutritional ketosis days, when he had his menu blog, I used to see Jimmy Moore posting pictures of Atkins-type candy bars to which he'd added whipped cream with sweetener added to it, and DaVinci syrup poured over it. I suspect a healthy metabolism should find this sickly-sweet, rather than appealing. Cause of weight gain, or symptom?

http://www.nature.com/hr/journal/v3...lication_detail



There's a study where mice given high-dose leptin centrally lost their appetite, until their body fat was pretty much depleted--at which point they ate as many calories as control mice, but given the choice, preferred a higher protein vs. a higher carb diet. Another example of an effect of leptin on interest in/appetite for carbohydrate.

Of course, the actual intake of the carbs would facilitate weight gain. And, preference for sweet? Some people think palatability causes weight gain. I think a strong case could be made for the process of weight gain causing palatability.


It took the equivalent of forty cans of diet coke to do that to these people?

How many cans of full-sugar coke would it take to do the same damage? Thirty nine grams in a can of coke, forty cans of coke, that's 1560 grams of sugar, 6240 calories. Half the dose? 780 grams of sugar, 3120 calories. I wonder what would happen to people's glucose tolerance with that added to their diet? Even if it didn't have as strong a short-term effect as the saccharin etc., I have a pretty strong suspicion it might be worse long term.
I wonder at what level of artificial sweetener intake a person would have been better off using sugar? Is there one?

I don't know how bad artificial sweeteners might be for me, but I do know sugar has a pretty bad effect on me. So when I want a sweet taste I personally choose the maybe might could end up found to be a problem for me someday rather than the definitely is.

I'd like to see that paper; stevia has a reputation for not doing that.

Just an abstract. For people with type II diabetes or insulin resistance, the question of which is worse, so much sugar, or sweeteners to match the sweetness of that much sugar is probably easier to answer--it's the sugar that's worse.

Sucralose is supposed to be 300-1000 times as sweet as table sugar--in this study, that works out to the sweetness of 213-667 grams of sugar.

And yet, the studies I've noticed with xylitol -- although people do have to adapt to it gradually (or risk the runs), and take it fairly consistently (the gut biome changes fast, so adaptation has to be kept up) -- make it out to be incredibly health-promoting. Not just for teeth. Maybe that adaptation part makes it slightly inconvenient but geez, I'm still surprised that the stuff isn't way more popular than it is.

PJ

Well for those of use who have dogs one of the reasons is how DEADLY xylitol is for dogs, unlike other sweeteners. It's the main reason Dana Carpender refuses to use it in her recipes. She (like me) is a dog owner. I've already had to pay for one trip to the emergency vet for a stomach pump when my dog managed to eat something I'd accidentally bought that contained xylitol. The dose to kill a dog is not that high.