Vol 30–The Lowdown on Artificial Sweeteners: Is It Safe? Exploring the Risks and Regulations of Artificial Sweeteners

Quick Look 👀

1 oz of water to garden your health

2 Weeds to avoid

2 Websites to cultivate your garden

1 Budding Tweet

Random Musings

Reading Time: 5 minutes and 4 seconds

This week's newsletter is brought to you by artificial sweeteners.

They are found in so many things I consume, sometimes without me even knowing. But does that even matter? do they cause cancer? are they bad for me?

So this week I set out to answer these questions and so much more, to help you be best informed when consuming artificial sweeteners.

Action to water your health

Artificial Sweeteners (Non-nutritive sweeteners). Are synthetic sugar substitutes that are added to many processed foods marketed as “diet” or “sugar-free.” They don't contain sugar or calories as regular sugar does. They provide a sweet taste without the use of sugar and often replace sugar in dietary products and baking recipes.

Common artificial sweeteners:

• acesulfame K (200x sweeter than sugar)

• aspartame (200x sweeter than sugar)

• saccharin (600x sweeter than sugar)

• sucralose (300x sweeter than sugar)

• xylitol

Cancer Risk. This is massively controversial. This recent study looked at many studies and found “no correlation between artificial sweeteners and occurrence of cancer except urinary system cancer in women.”

But this recent (2022) study assessed the association between artificial sweetener intake and cancer risk. The authors assessed dietary intake and consumption of artificial sweeteners from 102,865 people in France twice per year between 2009 and 2021 via three nonconsecutive web-based 24-hour dietary records randomly assigned over 15 days (two weekdays and one weekend day).

Baseline dietary intakes were evaluated by averaging all 24-hour dietary records during the first two years of follow-up.

They found “high intakes of artificial sweeteners were associated with a 15% increased cancer risk over a median of 7.7 years.”

Heart disease. This population study from France (2022) results showed total artificial sweetener intake was associated with:

• Increased risk of cardiovascular diseases

• Associated with cerebrovascular disease risk

• Increased coronary heart disease risk (acesulfame potassium and sucralose)

This was a Population-based prospective cohort study (2009-21).

Gut Microbiome. Artificial sweeteners, directly and indirectly, affect the gut microbiome on bacterial (and fungi) growth, physiology, metabolism, gene expression, and communication, as well as community-wide effects.

It is thought that interaction with the gut microbiome can influence host metabolic health (negatively). We still don’t know exactly how.

But we are starting to understand how the gut microbiome affects almost every organ in the body. You can read more about psychobiotics, and their effect on travel on gut health that I tweeted about.

Regulations Around the World on Artificial Sweeteners

Canada. “ There are no well-established health benefits associated with the intake of sweeteners, nutritious foods, and beverages that are unsweetened should be promoted instead.”

Israel. “This ultra-processed food and their consumptions should be reduced as much as possible.” They further categorize artificial sweeteners into group 4 (ultra-processed foods and drink products).

European Union (the food and safety authority). Have “Acceptable daily intake (ADI), which is the amount of a food additive, expressed as mg/kg body weight, that can be ingested daily over a lifetime without incurring any appreciable health risk.” For each artificial sweetener.” (read here).

American Heart Association (AHA). “Children should not drink LCS beverages in the long-term because of unknown effects. If there is a potential increased risk in adults of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular events with diet beverage intake, the risk could be heightened in a child due to their smaller body size and earlier exposure.”

The Federal drug administration does have an Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) for most artificial sweeteners. If you want specifics on each artificial sweetener from the FDA including ADI and more read here.

Takeaway. Wow! the amount of research and unclear information is overwhelming. I could have written dissertations on this topic.

Artificial sweeteners can affect the microbiome and cause trickle events downstream. We have no idea what they are! nor how it really works. it could increase your risk of cancer, but maybe not. It could also increase your risk of heart and brain disease (but maybe not).

The majority of these studies are not without limitations. That is to say, do you want to consume a product that is still under intense deliberations?

Here are my suggestions:

• If you consume artificial sugar, limit it.

• If you don’t think you consume it, check the ingredients (you likely do).

• If you use it as an alterative to sugar, keep doing so but consider cutting back in general.

• Seldomly let infants or children consume these products (if able). I know I've consumed tons of artificial sweeteners growing up.

Weeds to avoid

1️⃣ Friends who don’t root for you after your successes. Regardless of where they are in life. We should be uplifting each other and helping out as much as we can.

2️⃣ Being overly driven by health metrics to either extreme. Some people have an Oura ring, smart sleep mattress, personalized genetic testing, etc., and spend hours analyzing their data to get optimal numbers.

Let’s find some balance. Reminds me of when I was eating at a nice restaurant and some young woman stood up and said out loud “my apple watch says time to move.” Proceeds to stand up and start jogging in place, but her friend hid in embarrassment.

Websites to cultivate your garden

Listen notes: This is the best podcast search engine. Enter any person's name and it will show every podcast they have ever been in.

Decipad: This is a new note-taking notebook that is interactive with data. It’s a new concept that I’ve never seen. Here's an example of salary negotiations with interactive data. LMK if you end up making something with it

Budding Tweet

From this tweet, you can see the different effects artificial sweeteners have on the gut microbiome and glycemic response. Saccharin (600x sweeter than sugar), from the graph, appears to have the most impact.

Random Musings

1. Any fool can learn from experiences. The trick is to learn from other people’s experiences. We can do this from books, podcasts, friends, etc. It's harder to learn since it's not happening to us.

2. You will lose in life, thats a fact. In whatever you do. How are you going to respond?

3. This tool will calculate daily nutrient recommendations based on Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs).

You're an awesome human

Martin, CEO of braincrumbss

Stuff I created, that you might find helpful.

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2. This product is free. It is the most comprehensive tool for digital nomads who end up with diarrhea 💩. How to treat it, when to worry, and what to pack. Everything. I spend an embarrassing amount of time writing this. Yes, this was created from personal experience on an overseas trip 😮