Erythritol and Splenda: Science vs. Sensationalism
Part 1 of 3
For nearly 20 years, I’ve been sharing information about artificial sweeteners. Over the next three weeks, I’d like to review some studies that have made headlines about erythritol, Splenda and aspartame.
In February 2023, we saw news reports about erythritol, the “Zero-calorie sweetener linked to heart attack and stroke.” Researchers found that people with higher levels of erythritol in their blood were more likely to suffer heart attacks or strokes.
But, the study didn’t actually look at how much erythritol people were consuming. They only looked at how much was circulating in the plasma. That’s a problem because erythritol can be naturally made in the body via the penthos phosphate pathway.
So now we have two options. Those higher levels could have either happened naturally or were because of what subjects ate. But we don’t know which.
Studies show that when people consume things with erythritol, it is “poorly metabolized and mostly excreted in the urine.” Plus, our bodies can produce erythritol in response to oxidative stress or vascular damage.
When you understand that, it would be logical to find that people with the highest plasma erythritol had more strokes and heart attacks. Erythritol is one of the things a body produces when you’re sick. How healthy were the people in the study?
More than 75% of the subjects researchers looked at had coronary artery disease. The average age was between 55 and 72, and the average body mass index (BMI) was 29.2. That’s borderline obese. This group of unhealthy people was already producing higher levels of erythritol naturally.
But because researchers didn’t bother to track dietary erythritol, there’s no way to know if the high levels were a RESULT of poor health or were a CAUSE of the poor health.
Then the artificial sweetener Splenda started making headlines.
In June 2023, news organizations reported that a “Chemical found in Splenda damages DNA: ‘Genotoxic’ discovery.” I received calls and emails from over a dozen people asking, is Splenda safe? Should I stop using it?
That headline resulted from a study published in May 2023 in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health. If you don’t care about the technical jargon, skip the next paragraph where the study describes the problem.
“Sucralose-6-acetate significantly increased the expression of genes associated with inflammation, oxidative stress, and cancer with greatest expression for the metallothionein 1 G gene (MT1G) (which is associated with liver cancer).”
In simple terms, one of the chemical components of Splenda can increase the risk of liver cancer.
The study ran eight different in vitro experiments. That means experiments “outside the living body and in an artificial environment.” In other words, they ran this experiment on a bunch of cells in a petri dish.
The following two paragraphs quote the study. Skip them, and I summarize what they’re saying.
Researchers exposed TK6 cells (cells isolated from the spleen of a 5-year old) “to 20 concentrations of sucralose-6-acetate (maximum 4.5489 mM or 2000 μg/ml) or 20 concentrations of sucralose (maximum 10 mM or 3980 μg/ml) with a dose spacing of 1.4142 (square root of 2) in the presence (+S9) and absence (−S9) of metabolic activation along with vehicle control alone using 96-well plates.”
“... there were 4 successive increasing concentrations of sucralose beginning at 994 µg/ml (2.5 mM) in the non-activated treatment that resulted in a greater than 2-fold rise in γH2A×, a marker for DNA breaks.”
That means researchers exposed those cells in the petri dish to the amount of sucralose you would find in one and a half sodas.
The study included a reference to compare the doses they exposed those cells to with what you would find in drinks. But what was NOT considered in the study, is that most of the Sucralose people consume leaves your body when you poop.
What you drink is not what you absorb. Something similar happens when you eat corn. What you eat is not necessarily what your body absorbs.
We need to know how much sucralose is circulating in your blood after a sucralose drink. For that, I had to go back to a 2017 study that had adults consume up to 250 milligrams of sucralose, the equivalent of what you find in four diet sodas. That study found blood concentrations peaked at 200 to 400 NANOGRAMS/ml.
Let’s do the math. If four diet drinks reach 200 to 400 nanograms, you would need to drink 8,000 diet sodas to reach the concentrations they used in the study. It’s bad science combined with misleading headlines.
In part 3 of this article, I’ll address real problems with artificial sweeteners, but having a heart attack or stroke from erythritol or getting liver cancer from drinking a diet drink with sucralose in it has not been shown to be one of those problems.
Part 1 2 3
Reference Links:
The artificial sweetener erythritol and cardiovascular event risk
Marco Witkowski, Ina Nemet, Hassan Alamri, Jennifer Wilcox, Nilaksh Gupta, Nisreen Nimer, Arash Haghikia, Xinmin S. Li, Yuping Wu, Prasenjit Prasad Saha, Ilja Demuth, Maximilian König, Elisabeth Steinhagen-Thiessen, Tomas Cajka, Oliver Fiehn, Ulf Landmesser, W. H. Wilson Tang & Stanley L. Hazen
Nature Medicine, Published 27 February 2023
Erythritol synthesis is elevated in response to oxidative stress and regulated by the non-oxidative pentose phosphate pathway in A549 cells
Semira R. Ortiz1, Alexander Heinz2, Karsten Hiller2 and Martha S. Field1*
Frontiers in Nutrition, Published 06 October, 2022 - Volume 9 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2022.953056
Toxicological and pharmacokinetic properties of sucralose-6-acetate and its parent sucralose: in vitro screening assays
Susan S. Schiffman, Elizabeth H. Scholl, Terrence S. Furey & H. Troy Nagle
Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Published online: 29 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1080/10937404.2023.2213903
Development and Application of TK6-derived Cells Expressing Human Cytochrome P450s for Genotoxicity Testing
Xilin Li, Si Chen, Xiaoqing Guo, Qiangen Wu, Ji-Eun Seo, Lei Guo, Mugimane G Manjanatha, Tong Zhou, Kristine L Witt, Nan Mei
Toxicological Sciences: An Official Journal of the Society of Toxicology, Published 2020 Jun 1;175(2):251-265. doi: 10.1093/toxsci/kfaa035.
Plasma concentrations of sucralose in children and adults
Allison C. Sylvetsky,Viviana Bauman,Jenny E. Blau,H. Martin Garraffo,Peter J. Walter &Kristina I. Rother
STUDY JOURNAL, Published 06 June 2017 - Cite this as: BMJ 2017;357:j2353
Ten-Week Sucralose Consumption Induces Gut Dysbiosis and Altered Glucose and Insulin Levels in Healthy Young Adults
Lucía A. Méndez-García ,Nallely Bueno-Hernández, Miguel A. Cid-Soto, Karen L. De León, Viridiana M. Mendoza-Martínez, Aranza J. Espinosa-Flores, Miguel Carrero-Aguirre, Marcela Esquivel-Velázquez, Mireya León-Hernández, Rebeca Viurcos-Sanabria, Alejandra Ruíz-Barranco, Julián M. Cota-Arce, Angélica Álvarez-Lee, Marco A. De León-Nava, Guillermo Meléndez and Galileo Escobedo
Microorganisms, Published 14 February 2022 https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms10020434
No Association between Low-Calorie Sweetener (LCS) Use and Overall Cancer Risk in the Nationally Representative Database in the US: Analyses of NHANES 1988–2018 Data and 2019 Public-Use Linked Mortality Files
Victor L. Fulgoni III and Adam Drewnowski
Nutrients, Published 22 November 2022
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7/2/2023
