ZOE Science & Nutrition - Are artificial sweeteners harming your gut? | Dr. Eran Elinav and Prof. Tim Spector
Episode Date: December 12, 2024Artificial sweeteners are everywhere. They hide in cereal, salad dressing – even in health foods. But are they really a guilt-free way to satisfy your sweet tooth? Or is it naive to think that – b...ecause they’re zero calorie – they’re free of consequence? New research shows there is a consequence. And it could be massive. Artificial sweeteners may disrupt the delicate balance of bacteria that live in your gut. You could see ripple effects like chronic disease, weight gain and a weakened ability to process real sugar. Today’s guest is at the forefront of this research. For the last decade, Dr Eran Elinav led breakthroughs on the science behind popular sweeteners. He leads The Institute for Microbiome Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He’s published over 100 publications in leading scientific journals. And his lab is on the cutting-edge of gut microbiome research. We’re also joined today by Tim Spector. Tim is one of the world’s top 100 most-cited scientists, a professor of epidemiology, and my scientific Co-Founder at ZOE. You’ll finish today’s episode knowing what's in your sweetener, how it’s affecting you, and where to turn to satisfy your sweet tooth. 🥑 Make smarter food choices. Become a member at zoe.com - 10% off with code PODCAST 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily 30+ Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes: 00:00 The truth about artificial sweeteners 01:49 Quick fire questions 04:03 Tim's self-experiment 07:40 What is an artificial sweetener? 09:47 Examples of popular sweeteners 10:45 Detrimental effects of sugar on your health 13:11 Sugar's impact on gut health 16:30 Which factors affect the gut microbiome? 18:44 Full Fat Coke vs Diet Coke 21:05 Do diet drinks help weight loss? 26:00 Calorie restriction diets 28:01 Sweeteners and diabetes risk 35:50 Why your microbiome is a chemical factory 42:15 Not all sweeteners are created equal 49:00 The WHO's view on sweeteners 52:30 Practical advice on chemicals in food 55:05 How to transition off sweet drinks 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks Mentioned in today's episode Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota (2023), published in Nature Personalized microbiome-driven effects of non-nutritive sweeteners on human glucose tolerance (2022), published in Cell Acute and two-week effects of neotame, stevia rebaudioside M and sucrose-sweetened biscuits on postprandial appetite and endocrine response in adults with overweight/obesity-a randomised crossover trial from the SWEET consortium (2024), published in EBioMedicine The contentious relationship artificial sweeteners and cardiovascular health (2023), published in The Egyptian Journal of Internal Medicine Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.
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Welcome to ZOE, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Artificial sweeteners are everywhere. They hide in cereal, in salad dressing, even in health foods.
But are they really a guilt-free way to satisfy your sweet tooth?
Or is it naive to think that because they're zero calorie,
they're free of consequence?
New research shows that there is a consequence,
and it could be massive.
Artificial sweeteners may disrupt the delicate balance
of bacteria that live in your gut.
You could see ripple effects like chronic disease, weight gain and a weakened ability to process real sugars.
So is it worth it to eat that seemingly innocent low calorie muffin if it
jeopardizes your future enjoyment of a real muffin?
Today's guest is at the forefront of this research. For the last decade, Dr. Aran Ilanav let breakthroughs on the science behind popular sweeteners.
He leads the Institute for Microbiome Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
He's published over a hundred papers in leading scientific journals,
and his lab is on the cutting edge of gut microbiome research.
We're also joined today by Tim Spector.
Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists, a professor of epidemiology, and
my scientific co-founder at Zuri.
You'll finish today's episode knowing what's in your sweetener, how it's affecting you,
and where to turn to satisfy your sweet tooth.
Aran, thank you very much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to be with you
guys. We have a tradition here at Zoey Aran
where we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners.
It's designed to be incredibly difficult for professors
because we have these very strict rules. You can say yes
or no or if you absolutely have to, you can give us a
one sentence answer. Are you willing to give it a go?
Yes, I hope I can comply with your strict rules.
Well, let's see. Aran, are artificial sweeteners healthier than sugar?
Not sure.
I told you it's tricky. Could some artificial sweeteners be harming our gut microbiome?
They definitely change our microbiome in ways which could be harmful in some cases.
Tim, stevia comes from a plant.
Does that mean it's good for us?
No, so does hemlock.
Sorry, that's making me laugh so much that I can't move on.
Tim, could eating artificial sweeteners make you crave sugar?
It's possible.
Wonderful.
All right.
And then final question.
You get a whole sentence on this one, Iran, and after this, you can then have paragraphs.
What do you think is the biggest misconception around artificial sweetness? I think the biggest misconception is that artificial sweeteners are inert to the human
body.
I actually think that's a brilliant introduction because until a couple of years ago, I absolutely
thought artificial sweeteners were completely inert to the human body.
I'm incredibly excited to have you around on the show because there are almost no randomized controlled trials published about sweeteners on human beings
Except for yours, you know published in the world leading journals nature and cells
So we've definitely have this opportunity to speak to you know, really the top researcher in in the topic
Before we get into that actually love to ask Tim about this story that he told me
That made me start to think that maybe
artificial sweeteners weren't this thing that I'd always been told.
And I remember, Tim, that you told me this story about an experiment you did on yourself.
Could you share that story perhaps with all of us?
As you know, Jonathan, from my books, I often do a bit of self-experimentation, doing things
like the French cheese diet or doing my son the McDonald's
diet.
And I was really interested in this idea that artificial sweeteners were totally harmless
and that these chemicals just passed through us, just tickling our taste receptors and
nothing else.
And they couldn't possibly affect our metabolism because that's the story that the drinks industry
was telling us really.
And so I took a big dose of several sweeteners.
I tried initially a Spartane,
then I started wearing a glucose monitor.
So we were, in the early days of Zoey,
we were testing these glucose monitors to see if I got a sugar
spike at all by taking a couple of these sachets.
I didn't get anything with aspartame, but then I changed to sucralose, which I think
is called Splenda in most countries.
Did this three times.
Two out of the three, I got a significant sugar spike.
My glucose level actually went up.
Not as much as if I was having a whole can of Coke or Pepsi, but significant deviation
and then it went back to normal again.
I did one of these in a metabolic chamber, so I knew there was nothing else going on
because it was very boring in there.
There was nothing to do or I couldn't exercise or anything else.
I knew it probably had to be the sucralose that was doing this.
That's when I realized that these were absolutely not inert and that certainly some people,
I put myself with them, are some of the people that responded to it.
I did give it to some of my other colleagues at work, and some reacted and some didn't.
We did a few experiments on twins as well.
It was clear that there wasn't a consistent response to the sucralose.
Sucralose is the one that isn't absorbed early on in the gut.
It stays in the gut all the way down, and so
you could actually pick it up in the stool.
So that was really my first dabble into the science of these artificial sweeteners, realizing
that A, they're different, and B, some people do react to them and will trigger their sugar,
and therefore, although I didn't measure it, it would be triggering my insulin levels as
well.
And that really made me worry that we'd been misled for all these years into thinking they were totally inert and that they were doing something to our body and we should definitely
find out more. I'd like to share something exciting. Back in March 2022, we started this
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Okay, back to the show.
Eran, could you come in here and help us to understand maybe just right at the beginning, like what is an artificial sweetener? Why do they exist?
Yeah, so artificial sweeteners, which are currently re-termed non-nutritive sweeteners are a very diverse group of chemicals that feature a very intense
sweet taste.
In other words, they are much better than natural sugar in engaging and inducing taste
receptors which lead to our brain interpreting their tastes as intensely sweet.
So there are hundreds of times sweeter than the natural sugar. And these artificial compounds were developed and discovered
over a century ago as means of satisfying people's sweet tooth without
paying the caloric price. So I think the first of these compounds was saccharin, which was discovered over 100 years
ago and it was used as an inexpensive and intensely sweet substitute to sugar.
These compounds have been extensively integrated into human diet with the hope and belief that
we would generate this pleasurable, intense, sweet
taste to many of our foods.
These compounds can be found both as an independent additive to coffee and so on and so forth,
but also if you were to go to your local supermarket and look at the ingredient links of many foods,
you would find these compounds integrated in many cases
without explicitly telling the consumers that they are there.
It's actually very hard and very difficult.
It was one of our biggest challenges to find individuals who are not exposed to these compounds
in their daily lives.
There's a huge range of them on there.
As well as saccharin, which was one of the early ones, which came, I think, from the
petroleum industry. A lot of these come from basic organic chemistry rather than as foods
originally discovered by accident. Then you've got the aspartame, the sucraloses, the ACEKs,
all the sugar alcohols, things like xylitol, also some newer ones, things like monk fruit, neotame. There's an
increasing list of these that are often used in combination now, even with sugar. So that's
why it's very hard for people to work out what they're eating is because they're often
mixed up now and very hard to separate them.
And Aran, what are the benefits of these artificial sweeteners?
Why are people putting them into the foods that we eat?
Well, I think it's very clear and overwhelmingly proven
that sugar has detrimental effects on our health.
This goes without question, and this is an epidemic
that we've been developing as a species, as the human species, mainly
since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Humans have dramatically enhanced their daily consumption of sugar, integrated it into many
of our foods.
This is not the only contributor to the obesity and diabetes pandemic that we're experiencing
as a species, but it is definitely one of the major causes to the quite astonishing
rise in these metabolic diseases that we've experienced in the last century or so.
Now with the realization that sugar is so unhealthy for us, and on the other
hand, the realization that humans love sweet taste and increasingly so, people have searched for
solutions that would satisfy the sweet tooth without having to pay the detrimental caloric sugary prices. And in that sense came these compounds that have been hoped and believed to
generate a sweet taste, although with an aftertaste, while not having us pay this detrimental
caloric price. And Eran, I just want to clarify, when you say pay the caloric price, could you explain what you mean? Yes, it has been believed and actually also very well documented that the vast majority of these
artificial compounds, these artificial sweeteners are not digested and metabolized by the human
body or by the human cells in our body. And therefore, since they're not broken down, they do not generate energy or calories that
would ultimately lead to weight gain, potentially to diabetes and other metabolic complications.
So this part of the equation, I think, is inherently true.
And this is the reason why we hoped and believed that consumption of these compounds
would not contribute to the metabolic epidemic.
However, one thing that we've discovered, and I think is very interesting and also potentially
very important, is that when we look at the human body, we always concentrate on the human cells of the body
but until
relatively recently
we
did not consider the vast populations of microbes that live within our body from the moment we are born
until the moment we die which we collectively term the microbiome as
Integral part of the human body now when we look at the microbes in contrast to the human cells, what we've discovered
is that in many cases the microbes, which are much better metabolic factors than our
human cells, are able to react, to degrade, and to alter their behavior upon exposure
to these seemingly inert artificial sweeteners.
In other words, the human body is probably directly inert to these compounds, but when
considering the entirety of our body, including the vast majority of microbial cells that
are part of us, I think it is also safe to say that in many cases, we are reacting to these compounds
in ways which in some cases can lead to obesity, to diabetes, and to their long-term complications.
I just remember my grandmother who had type 2 diabetes was taking saccharin,
and she was told by her doctor that this was going to
help the diabetes in a way and allow her to have her sweet things and satisfy her sweet
tooth. That was one of the early reasons, Jonathan, that people used these sweeteners
when they first came out because they were also more expensive initially when they came
out. They weren't as cheap as they are now.
I think the other big reason that they've crept in is tooth decay because in a way that's the one proven benefit of these swinners is that they do reduce tooth decay which is caused by microbes
in the mouth reacting with the sugars to produce certain chemicals,
which then erodes the teeth. So without those sugars, the microbes really don't do any great
harm to our teeth. So we're probably going to be a bit mean about sweeteners, but we ought to be
honest and say, well, dentists do like them and for good reason.
I love that.
So the dentists listening to this are all like how dare you start saying anything
bad about sweeteners they're fantastic for your teeth. We're now going to look
at the rest of the body and the picture is going to be a bit more complicated is
that what you're saying? Exactly. Yeah. Iran, how long have you been studying
artificial sweetness? We're originally not artificial sweetness researchers.
We are microbiome researchers.
We were fortunate to be engaging in the research of the microbiome
since probably the beginning of the field in the late first decade of 2000.
And one of the findings which struck us was that of the many environmental factors that impact
and shape our gut microbial population, I think the most important one is our diet.
Increasingly in our early research, we were engaged in trying to understand
how different dietary compounds may impact the composition and the
functions of our commensal microbes, and by doing so, impact our health.
Artificial sweeteners at the beginning came to us just as an example of a commonly consumed
food product or food supplement that generated many, many studies and results in animal models and in
humans that were often contradictory to one another.
So there was a very big, I would say, fight in the scientific, medical, and layman fields
with a lot of contribution from the industry in asking whether artificial sweeteners are
indeed beneficial, detrimental, or maybe
they don't do anything.
And many studies, some of which were of good quality, suggested all of the above.
So our idea, our eureka moment, was that we want to study the possibility that all of
these conflicting results could be driven by individual differences in people's
microbiomes.
In other words, if you carry a certain fingerprint of microbial composition, maybe your reactivity
to some of these artificial compounds would be different than someone else, and this could
explain why different people claim different things in response to these seemingly inert
compounds.
So this was a very naive and very serendipity driven question that we asked and the results
were so surprising that they basically drew us deeper and deeper into this type of research.
And of course, the fact that I was drinking two to three bottles of diet Coke a day didn't
help in that regard.
Well, that's really interesting because I was thinking about that this morning, that
I'm in my late 40s and when I was growing up, I think there was this huge push to move
from what I was brought up to call fat coke to move to diet coke and the same for all
the other sweetened beverages with the view that, you know, these traditional drinks that
I drank a lot of as a kid were full of sugar. This was really bad for you. And if you swapped
it for these artificial sweeteners, it was just the same as drinking water in terms of
like the health benefit, but it tasted really sweet. And, you know, that was a really great
way to move away from, you know, the coke that I've been drinking.
And if I understand rightly, what you're saying is this story hasn't really turned out to
be true.
This is not the same as water.
Right.
And if you look at the many studies, and we have looked at the many studies in humans
and in animal models, scanning from fruit flies to mice and monkeys,
you can see that the results are all over the place.
And in some instances,
the results point towards a beneficial effect
of some sweep years,
in others they point towards a detrimental effect.
And in a third group of studies,
there is no effect whatsoever.
So I think that the conflict that this represented, including the financial implications that
were involved here, was not just emotional.
It really initiated from a very confusing literature on the matter.
So you could pick your opinion based on your favorite studies and disregard the others,
but this didn't really generalize to a uniform truth.
As I think back to this story of why I was being told I should switch to the diet coke
and everyone around me, this was very much driven by weight rather than health.
The conversation was there's all these calories in these drinks that are full
of sugar.
And if you move to the diet one, suddenly there were no calories.
So I think you said you were drinking three cans a day.
Is that what you said, Durand?
I was drinking more than three cans a day.
I was talking about more than three.
So that's a lot of calories that you would stop having, right?
If you move from the sugar version to the sweetener.
And so I remember being told, well, everyone will lose lots of weight if you make this shift. So
these were like, that's why they were called diet drinks at the time. What's the evidence for that?
What has the science ended up showing? You're absolutely right. This is the common belief.
This is what I believe. But when you actually look at the literature, you can find conflicting
examples of clinical trials, some of which are of high quality,
that show such an artificial sweetener
induced improvement in health.
You can find other studies that are equally of high quality
that would show you the opposite
or don't show any effect at all.
One thing that I think is very important to state here
is that sugar is unhealthy for our health.
So excess sugar is not good for us.
And all of this discussion should be emphasizing that we're not promoting the reversal of artificial
sweetener consumption towards sugar because this is for sure something that would make
your health worsen. I am not saying in any form or shape that artificial sweeteners should be reverted into
sugar.
The question is whether it is possible, and this is what we found, that both may have
adverse impacts on our health and we should avoid them all together. What I remember when I was looking at this from one of my books,
I was struck by stories like Aran's story about how he went from three to five diet cokes a day that
if it swapped regular sodas for those, he should be having six to 800 calories less a day.
That's like a third of his calorie intake.
He should be shedding masses of weight by doing that.
The one thing you see in all these studies is no evidence whatsoever of any big shifts
in weight.
When you look at the meta-analysis, which is when they've combined all these studies
together, often you can see tiny differences between the groups, less than 0.2 of a kilo
difference between these groups, which is not matching at all these calorie differences.
That was really instrumental in me, firstly, doubting the whole calorie question that calories were the only thing
that matters in nutrition, and also this whole story that the drinks industry had sold us
about these diet drinks because it just didn't happen that way.
So in a way, that for me was my entry to this, why it was so weird that when you looked at
the epidemiology,
you didn't see these big effects that you would expect if people were suddenly swapping
from regular sodas to diet drinks.
In theory, the weight should have poured off them, and that just absolutely didn't happen.
Unless you were super slim, Iran, but I'm not sure that was the case.
Was that right?
I was far from it.
You know, and one of, since I'm situated at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel
and we have many world-leading physicists here in addition to us biologists, one of
my physicist friends told me once, you know, if there was an alien coming into earth and
he would look into this matter, he would probably end up with a conclusion that
artificial sweeteners promote weight gain because he would find all of these overweight and obese
individuals consuming them very heavily. So really it's the egg and the chicken question
that really intrigued us. Tim, that's slightly mad, isn't it? That you could switch from taking, you know, you can take 600 to 800 calories out of your diet by going from, you know, the full fat coke
to the diet coke. And you're saying then when you look at all these studies, you don't have
this massive weight loss. Could you just explain for a minute what's going on?
Well, exactly. I mean, the question is what's not happening? What's not happening is that there's a direct correlation between your calorie
intake and your weight loss so that the body is perhaps compensating in other ways.
That was one explanation, which we are increasingly seeing that either your
appetite is potentially ramped up slightly or your metabolism is altered
in subtle ways to compensate for this, or something else is happening to your metabolism
that we don't fully understand.
Many of them were quite rigorous studies.
There are hundreds of them now, and none of them showed
this big effect that you would see if there was a direct correlation between this reduction
in calories.
It's similar to the calorie restriction diets that we see, that you do get an initial bit
of weight loss and then the body compensates and then your weight starts to regain your
appetite increases day by day just subtly and you don't even notice that you're perhaps
hungrier than you were.
So it's a combination of these things plus as we're going to go and explain these consequences
of what these chemicals are doing perhaps perhaps to our gut microbes, that
are then making them secrete other chemicals that might have an effect on our brain or
our metabolism or our immune system in ways we don't yet fully understand.
For me, that was my eureka moment, was this looking at the epidemiology early on before
anyone else was really into it and saying, God, this doesn't make sense.
These should absolutely not be called diet drinks because that's the one thing they don't
really do is help you diet.
It's amazing.
Iran, I'd love to switch to your research now.
Very few people are actually doing studies on the microbiome in human beings where they're
able to really understand specific impact of specific foods.
That's obviously something that is really fascinating to me and I think lots of listeners.
Could you tell us, you know, I think you're saying you started with this idea
that these artificial sweeteners were inert, they didn't have any impact on us.
What is your research showing?
We started in exploring the possible impacts of these compounds, of these sweeteners in
animal models, specifically in mice, which are very controlled settings that we can learn
a lot from, that they're not as complex as human beings and as diverse.
My graduate student, now an independent researcher in his own right at Hopkins in the US, designed
an initial experiment in which he gave high doses of some of these compounds into mice
that have never, of course, seen these compounds.
And to our astonishment, his results were that these mice were developing a higher tendency to develop disturbances
in their blood sugar control.
They were kind of leaning towards the development of diabetes.
He showed me these results.
I did not believe them.
Of course, being a skeptic scientist, he repeated them again and again and again, and this was
very, very reproducible. This was the first eureka moment, which showed us that something in the body of these mammals,
of these mice, was actually reacting to these seemingly inert compounds in ways which could
be detrimental to health.
This started a very long journey in which we, at the beginning, mainly focused on one
of these compounds, which is called saccharin.
It's the grand daddy of all artificial sweeteners.
It's actually very popular as a sweetener in Israel, where we performed studies.
And we really dove deep into this one compound, tested it in different doses, including doses that are
equivalent to the lower doses that humans consume, different mice, different genders,
and so on and so forth.
In all of these cases, we found that in mice housed in our facility that carry a specific
microbiome, the consumption of saccharin was associated with a quite remarkable tendency to develop
disturbances in sugar control, to develop diabetes.
You're saying that you took these mice, you were just giving them this artificial sweetener.
You weren't giving them any sugar or doing anything else that was changing their diet.
You were just giving them this artificial sweetener, which we've all been told doesn't
do anything in our body.
It tastes sweet, it goes through.
In these mice, you actually ended up giving them diabetes,
which is a disease that I associate with having lots and lots of sugar
and other sweet food. Is that right?
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And this occurred when we gave these mice different diets,
for example, a diet reminiscent of the Western diet, full of fat, or in healthier diets.
This seems to be at least in our facility.
The question was, since this compound has been known and studied for a century, and
we know that the mammalian cells, the mouse cells, and the human cells probably don't digest it, how do the consumption of this compound
result in these diabetic effects?
This is where the microbiome came in, and we started looking into the microbiome because
this is what we do in life.
We found to our surprise that the microbes were actually reacting to this compound.
We could even induce diabetes by taking the microbes from the
guts of mice that were consuming saccharine and transferring just the microbes into mice
that have never seen saccharine.
These recipient mice developed diabetes, proving that the microbiome was actually driving the
effect.
This was a very big eureka moment for us, leading to the publication of our findings in Nature in 2014.
As you can imagine, this generated a lot of discussion that spanned outside of the scientific
and medical communities.
One must also mention that in this initial study, we've also performed a very small preliminary
study in human volunteers who were given saccharin.
And we measured their blood sugar controls using continuous glucose monitors, just as
Tim has mentioned.
And we found that half the people who were exposed to saccharin didn't care at all.
They didn't change their blood sugar control.
Their blood sugar levels were completely the same.
But the other half of these individuals developed marked disturbances in their blood sugar control,
even after a week of exposure to this compound.
None of the individuals in this small preliminary trial actually improved their blood sugar
control. This was a very counterintuitive but a very important moment in this type of study because
he told us something very fundamental, not only about artificial sweeteners.
He told us that rather than quantifying foods or food components in their ability to induce changes in the human body
or in the mouse body in this case, we need to start thinking about how to quantify the
recipient, the people who actually consume this compound.
This goes against the one size fits all dietary paradigm that was prevalent for 50 years before this and
led to the personalized nutrition concept which was developed.
Artificial sweeteners in our hands were the very first example of these personalized
microbiome driven effects that dictate why one person would react to a given food while
the other person would not react to the same exact food, even when it's consumed at
exactly the same quantities.
It's totally amazing. I just want to check one thing you said,
because you know, you were telling this writing, you know,
incredibly powerful story about what you put together in this
paper. I think you said that as part of this study, you
discovered that there were particular microbes that you
found in the gut of mice that had ended up getting diabetes, and you could take those particular microbes that you found in the gut of mice
that had ended up getting diabetes, and you could take those particular microbes and put them in
healthy mice, and those microbes alone gave those mice diabetes?
That's absolutely true. This is, for us, a formal proof of causality of showing that the microbiome was not only associated with a change driven
by diet, but it actually was driving at least some of the effect.
Because when the mice that received these microbes developed diabetes, they've never
seen the artificial sweeteners themselves.
They've just seen the microbes which were previously exposed to artificial sweeteners.
How did that change the way you thought about the microbiome after seeing those results?
Well, I think in those early days, we and several other groups such as the group of
Jeff Gordon have realized using different experiments, different projects, that the
human body, which was for 150 years of modern science regarded as this
amazing assortment of cells and tissues, was actually oblivious to a very big chunk which
should be considered as an integral part of this body.
This is the microbiome, this huge population of microbial cells, which are roughly equal to the number
of human cells in our body, which have remarkable metabolic capacities and remarkable contributions
to many aspects of our health or to our risk of developing many multifactorial and common
diseases.
This huge chunk of our body, which was very difficult to study for over a century, should
be regarded as part of the human body.
We now term the human body a holobiont, which is the human part and the microbial part put
together and communicate with each other.
Once you do that, some of the ground truth that we believed for many decades, for example, that artificial
sweeteners cannot be digested by the human side of this hollow biome are in fact digestible
by our microbial part.
I think another way to put this in context is if you think of our microbiome, Jonathan, is these series of pharmacies that basically are chemical factories.
When they see something like saccharin or sucralose, which they've never seen before,
right?
Evolution, they didn't come up, so they react rather oddly and they could produce all kinds
of weird chemicals in response to that.
Maybe trying to break it down, trying to eat it, doing whatever microbes do.
And those chemicals, it turns out, when you transplanted them into other animals,
can induce diabetes because they're like upsetting our metabolism.
And we don't understand all the chemicals in there.
We just know that this is part of this process, that you're messing up the pharmacy.
You're suddenly throwing
something in there that's, you know, all our normal chemicals are going out of kilter and
this is why it leads to these big changes. So I think that's the way to think about it. If
you feed our microbes anything a bit weird, there's a chance they're going to react in a
weird way themselves and then it could lead to these diseases. So that's why we've got to be very careful about what we're eating.
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It's an amazing story.
Aram, will you bring us up to date?
Because I know that you've continued
your research since then.
Yes.
So following the publication of this paper in Nature over a decade ago,
as you may imagine, we stirred a very extensive discussion in many different aspects of the
scientific community, the medical community, the nutritional community, and the layman audience, including some rather peculiar reactions from the industry,
but this stirred lots and lots of follow-up research from many, many research groups from
around the world and resulted in this almost decade of follow-up research in really a reign
of studies basically showing the same thing. In diverse models, stemming from worms, fruit flies, mice, monkeys, pigs, humans, you name
it, the microbiome has been shown to interact and to be non-inert to many of these compounds.
The more diverse the microbiome was of a given species, the more shadows of gray you would find in the reaction.
What was really missing in our view, though, was a really controlled, randomized setup of really testing these in humans in the most stringent manners. So, you know, despite the fact that we're not artificial smithner researchers, but we
are microbiome and nutrition microbiome researchers, we set up a follow-up study, this time mainly
focusing on humans, which was very rigorous and very well controlled.
And just to give you a flavor of how difficult it was to set up this study, what we wanted
to include in this study are individuals who are not exposed to artificial sweeteners in
their daily natural lives.
In order to avoid the possibility that such previous exposure would have already changed
the microbiome and would bias our findings.
And we planned on recruiting 120 such individuals, and at the end, our very meticulous screening
necessitated the screening of over 1,200 individuals to find these 120 individuals who did not
get exposed inadvertently to products in their daily nutritional life that including these compounds, just showing
you how embedded they are into our culture.
So these 120 individuals who do not consume, to the best of our knowledge, any artificial
sweeteners, even inadvertently, were very hard to find.
But once we've allocated these individuals, we were able to randomize them into groups of consumers
of one of four artificial sweeteners that are very popular around the world.
These were saccharin, sucralo, aspartame, and stevia, the natural product.
As control, we had two groups.
One consuming nothing, basically consuming water, and another important control group,
which were individuals consuming the very small quantities of sugar that are contained within the packets of artificial sweeteners.
Many people don't know this, but since these sweeteners are often accompanied by a bitter
aftertaste, the companies put a little bit of glucose of sugar to avoid or to ameliorate
this taste.
So, we had a whole group of individuals
just consuming the very tiny bits of sugar
to make sure that whatever we show
is not secondary to this small vehicle sugar exposure.
And we followed them up using continuous glucose monitor,
then using very frequent microbiome assessment before,
during and after consumption.
And to make a long story short, what we found in these randomized controlled trial very frequent microbiome assessment before, during, and after consumption.
To make a long story short, what we found in this randomized controlled trial was exactly
what I've described to you in the earlier mouse studies.
Some people with some microbiomes were adversely reacting to these four types of compounds
in having an altered blood sugar level.
In other words, these individuals were consuming these sweeteners and were developing a marked
change in their blood sugar control, which was for us a very important proof for the
non-inert nature of these compounds.
Of course, these four compounds are very different chemistries
So the microbial changes were very different between these groups of individuals
nonetheless this person specific effect was noted in all four groups and I also must add that
Not all sweeteners were created equally in other words when we look at these sweeteners as a whole group
Potentially adverse effects on blood sugar control were more pronounced as a group when
people were consuming saccharin or sucralose as compared to those consuming aspartame or stevia,
but on an individualized level, we could find people adversely reacting to all four
artificial sweeteners. But we didn't stop there.
And we went to the same painful drill of proving causality, not just association,
by taking the microbiomes from these individuals and transferring them into sterile mice,
which we call germ-free mice.
These are mice that we house in specialized isolators,
and they don't have any microbiomes of their own, called germ-free mice. These are mice that we house in specialized isolators,
and they don't have any microbiomes of their own,
but they're very useful in testing the impact
of human microbiomes on the mouse setting.
And when we did this, we found that we could reproduce
the same reactivity of different people
consuming the same artificial sweetener in recipient mice.
In other words, mice that were transferred with microbes
from an individual developing adverse effects to aspartame
also developed problems in their blood sugar control
as their human donor of microbiome.
And collectively, these mouse experiments
generated the proof of causality that the human microbiome was at least partially
responsible for these individualized effects upon consumption of different artificial sweeteners.
Horan, you've talked a lot about the impact on your blood sugar and potentially like risk of diabetes.
Is that the only thing that these artificial sweeteners can do or can they have an impact
on your health and your risk of diseases elsewhere?
Yeah, it's an excellent question.
And I need to clarify here that we've chose blood sugar responses as our readout, not
because it is necessarily the only effect of these sweeteners.
The reasoning for this decision was the technical because continuous glucose monitors enable us to
i extensively non invasive your minimally invasive leap study people's blood sugar responses
which was very helpful because we use a lot of a i and machine learning in order to interpret the big data that we generally
add the more conceptual reason for the focus on sugar is that blood sugar control is, of course,
important in diabetes, but it is also exceedingly important as a contributor to other parts
of what we call the metabolic syndrome, obesity, fatty liver, and their chronic and dreaded
cardiovascular complications.
For all of these reasons, we've focused on blood sugar control as our main readout, but
that doesn't mean that these are necessarily the only artificial sweetener effects.
I can just name one other type of effect, not the only one, which relates to the risk of developing a cardiovascular disease,
a heart disease, and other groups.
For example, the group by Stanley Hazen from the Cleveland Clinic have repeatedly shown
that artificial sweeteners may impact the function of platelets, the cells that are
responsible for clot formation in our body, and this could lead to adverse manifestations
that would impact the risk of developing a heart disease. This is just one other
example, and there are many different people performing research that is
focused on other aspects of our health, and so by no means is glucose
the only readout that is affected here. Jonathan, the WHO did a big review and meta-analysis, which they reported on last year, that included
283 studies.
So, there's an enormous body.
Most of those studies are not very good, and the evidence is still unclear.
They came up with interesting recommendations.
Overall, their recommendation was these products should not be used to lose weight.
They cautioned that it could be harmful to you.
The studies came into two halves.
There was a whole series of studies which were short-term, like the ones Iran's doing, but
with glucose, insulin, et cetera, and weight loss, usually comparing with sugar or water,
and showed only slight differences in weight.
So these tiny differences, so often nonsignificant, but very variable.
Some went one way, some went the other way.
Overall, rather trivial differences between them.
Then they looked at long-term epidemiology studies looking at heart disease, cancer,
many other diseases.
Most of those ended up showing around a 20% increase in those risks of the disease.
The evidence, because they're observational studies,
could always be biased.
They're sort of hard to interpret.
But there were these two strands.
One saying that short term, they might be slightly better than sugar, but long term,
they were causing a suggestion they were linked to some increases in diseases.
So it wasn't definitive, but it was still the first official body that came out saying
we should be worried about these chemicals.
And Tim, I just want to make sure I've understood that right, because I think I've also heard
you both say sugar is really bad.
So you're not saying swap artificial sweetness for sugar, but I think what you're saying is the
data is now starting to say something is completely different from what I was brought up with,
which is, wow, not only do artificial sweeteners not help you to lose any weight, which is
definitely not a story that I was being told, but you're actually saying there's starting to be
evidence that artificial sweeteners can really be negative for your health. So if you were able to take them out of your diet and not replace them with sugar, you
would be in a better place.
That's what the data overall is suggesting.
Although, you know, to do that, you'd need a proper randomized trial that lasted years
and that hasn't happened.
It's very hard to do it. So we have to rely on this imperfect evidence, which are these observational cohort studies.
And as Arun has pointed out, some people take these products because they feel they want
to lose weight or they want to get healthier rather than a pleasure choice.
So that's the difference.
But I think we're moving to the point where it can't be considered the same as water,
definitely, and the WHO's conclusion that it shouldn't be seen like that.
There are trivial weight loss advantages, and there's this potential gray area that they might be causing some of these diseases that
might well be mediated by our microbiomes that we need to investigate.
It's going to vary by person and it's going to vary by the actual sweeteners themselves.
It's hard to generalize as well because they all have very, very different actions.
As we've discussed, some are stevia know, steviax, very differently to something
like aspartame, for example, or sucralose.
So I would love to switch to actionable advice.
Like I think you've painted a picture that I think for a lot of listeners probably blows
their mind a bit because it's so different from the story we've heard.
And it's amazing around to hear you taking us through like your primary research has
done that. I guess the question I start with is, you know, should someone listening to this consume any
artificial sweetness? What's your takeaway around? This is a very important question,
and as you may imagine, I'm being asked this question in many different circumstances. And my very careful answer as both a physician and a scientist is that the jury is still
out there in terms of definite proof.
Medicine can be imaged as a very heavy ship that takes a lot of data in order to change
its tracks.
So really, the jury is still out there. But on the other hand,
I think that enough information has been accumulated on the fact that these seemingly
inert substances are not really inert, and they may impact our human body. In some cases,
and some people with some microbiomes, they may even cause adverse effects. And all of this
cumulative data, at least in my personal case, leads me to our recommendation
that people would practice a healthy skepticism and caution until we know better.
For sure, my recommendation for people is to never consider swapping sweeteners back
into sugar, this for sure would be not a very smart suggestion
because sugar is not good for you.
My personal preference is to avoid both of them until we know better and to drink water
as much as possible.
For those who find it impossible to minimize as much as possible the consumption, so to
control for excessive consumption of these compounds.
However, we need more information, we need more studies.
This field which really connected the microbiome
and these compounds just a decade ago
has now been branching into many different medical
and scientific groups exploring it.
So data is emerging. As Tim has mentioned,
the WHO has already concluded that enough evidence has been gathered to at least put out a general
warning against indiscriminate use, especially among populations at risk of developing diabetes
and obesity and so on and so forth. Until then, I would recommend the public to stay aware,
to learn more and more,
and to practice a healthy caution.
Well, I think the one thing, we don't want to petrify people
into thinking that if they have, you know,
one can of Diet Coke or Pepsi, you know,
they're going to get cancer or a heart attack,
that's not going to happen.
Probably at the level of one drink a week, really people shouldn't worry.
It's people like the early Iran who was drinking three to four diet Cokes a day, be more worried
about.
That's one thing.
Getting it down to reasonable levels, if you really enjoy those drinks,
you have them as a treat,
but you don't have it as a staple.
I think that's a sensible thing.
But I think the other big issue here
is on hidden chemicals in foods.
So you may have some of your favorite cereals,
biscuits, cakes, other foods,
some ready meals that contain these mixed up with salt and sugar
to sort of camouflage it that you're having on a regular basis.
And generally, you should be avoiding those ones.
Also these are a sign that that food is being tampered with.
It's been made by food chemists.
It's fake food that's messing with
your brain. So you should be highly suspicious of foods that contain it and try and see that
as a sign of poor quality and try and move to substances that aren't like that. I think that's
what shoppers should be doing because it's going to be increasingly hard to sort out which of these
are bad for you because they'll be a combination.
You often now see three or four sweeteners together with sugar in the same product.
Make it really, really tough to ever work out in the future what's there.
You should say, well, why is someone giving me five chemicals just to make me like this
product?
You should be more suspicious about it.
But at the same time, I don't get obsessed about it because the occasional use,
you know, we would have seen something by now if just having it once a week was
causing you major heart attacks or cancer or diabetes.
It doesn't do that and it's certainly better than sugar, but let's get be eating drink tea again.
You know, let's get them drinking kombucha.
Let's give them, you know, lots of, there are lots of other, um, healthy
beverages we should be switching to.
Do you know someone who loves a diet coke, puts splendor in their coffee,
or gives their kids sugar-free treats?
Why not share this episode with them right now and provide them with
the latest evidence on what lies beneath that sweet taste so they can make informed choices
for their health. I'm sure they'll thank you. And Tim, so imagine that you're saying that both
Coca-Cola and our diet Coca-Cola is off the table and same for all the other manufacturers,
but there'll be a lot of people saying, well, it's really hard to switch from that to water
because I'm really used to all of these sweet tastes.
Do you have like an easy tip for how to transition
off those drinks for anyone who's listening?
Well, most of us have done this when we were kids.
We used to, I used to anyway,
have tea with about four spoons of sugar in it
when I first started having
it.
And gradually you just dial it down so that you can go to three and then to two and then
to one.
And I think the same is true with these products.
You need to wean yourself off, I think, that amount of sugar.
And once you've done that, they're too sweet for me to actually have them now.
We do have these thresholds for sweetness that we can manipulate ourselves and get used to more
bitter tastes and sour tastes and fermented drinks and things like this are an important way.
So I think teas, kombuchas, and diluting down these products gradually to get
yourself off them in a few months is probably the way to do it. I'd love to come back to Stevia
because our listeners had a lot of questions about it because it's positioned as a natural product
and therefore they're saying well is that fine and I could put lots of stevia into all of my meals
because that's natural and therefore healthy.
It is a leaf in its original form, although the original leaf had a slightly metallic taste to it.
So the industry has worked out a way of producing some of the chemical in that leaf artificially through microbes.
So they actually make stevia in vast breweries using, I think it's yeast, to do what's called
precision fermentation.
And they will produce this bioidentical chemical called RebM, which gives you the stevia sweetness without that metallic taste,
and that's now produced.
You can call that natural or you can call it artificial, depending on your definitions,
but that's how it is produced.
It's only something better than from the petroleum industry. I think we need more data on it.
It sounds like it does interfere with our gut microbes, but we don't know whether that's
particularly good or bad.
I think Iran can tell us it disrupts them.
Some people, this might be harmful.
In others, it might be fine.
We don't really know yet, but we do know that they
are interacting with it. So I think the jury is still out on Stevia. It's probably better
than the other ones, but I don't think we quite know where it fits.
Heran, what are your thoughts on Stevia?
Well, first, I would like to say that I fully agree with Tim's interpretation and conclusions on the entire state of the art
of where we stand today.
With regard to stevia, indeed, what we found was that upon short-term consumption of doses
of stevia that correspond to, at most, to medium consumption of ingredients related to stevia, some people with some microbiomes
reacted to stevia by worsening their blood sugar control.
This was mediated by the microbiome because similar effects could be reproduced when we
took the microbiome from these consumers and transfer them into mice. However, whether this actually would cause a risk of disease and whether this would be
present when people consume stevia for a longer period of time is something we still don't
know.
So the jury is still out there.
For sure, such effect would likely be personalized, but we need more information.
I think on a more positive, forward-looking note, there is now a very keen and extensive
industry-sponsored effort to identify and to test new sweeteners that may or may not be better to our health than the
ones that we've tested.
The fact that they're natural or not natural to me is irrelevant.
As was mentioned before, some of nature's worst toxins are very natural, so that doesn't
mean that something is necessarily healthy for you.
But the fact that there is now a group effort to identify and to develop new formulations
of sweeteners provides hope that we may find such a formulation that would have minimal
effects on our microbiome or minimal effects on our body over long-term consumption that
would be good to many individuals.
We'll see.
And, Eran, do you think it's likely
that we'll be able to develop this artificial sweetener
that does cause no harm and still tastes really sweet?
I mean, I don't know.
I am skeptical that we would find a formulation
that would be totally inert to our microbiome,
because our microbiome is so amazing
in reacting to everything we store at it.
It's like this amazing biochemical factory that reacts in very strange ways to many different
things.
But maybe some of these reactions would be minimized or would be healthier or inert in
terms of their effect on the human body.
We just need to do the experiment and test these.
Got it. I mean, one of my takeaways from years of Zoe and these podcasts is that in general,
if you seem to only eat things that your great-grandparents ate, it feels like it
already puts you in a much, much better place than where we generally are. So I don't know any of the
science here, but it makes me feel that this is probably not where I want to make my bet.
Eran, Tim, thank you very much.
I would like to do a quick summary and I would ask both of you to keep me honest
and correct me if I get anything wrong, if that's okay.
So I think I start with a sort of bombshell that you don't lose any weight
with sweeteners.
And so all of those things that say diet on the side of the can, like don't help you lose any weight,
which is I think pretty extraordinary.
A tiny amount of weight is possible.
So yeah, but don't expect a miracle.
So that's true.
That then mice can develop diabetes
when you put them on sweeteners.
So again, the idea that these things are completely inert,
they don't do anything, they taste sweet, but have no other effect just isn't true. And then amazingly,
you can find the bugs that give them diabetes and put them into another mouse and give that mouse
diabetes. So again, like these particular bugs are responsible for this. And as a result of this,
we just got to rethink like what these sweeteners are doing. A diet drink is not like drinking water, adding a sweetener into some food that you buy from
the supermarket, that has changed it.
Having said all of this, I think you're both really clear that sugar is really bad for
our health, that this is causing an epidemic.
No one is saying swap the sweeteners and go back to sugar.
The problem is that human beings are born to love this sweet
taste. It's hard to get rid of it. The sweeteners give us that sweet taste. There is one benefit,
if you're a dentist listening, you're saying, well, hang on, sweeteners are great. You don't
get tooth decay. What we now understand, though, is that it has this highly personalized effect on us
because every human being has
this different microbiome and depending on the specific bugs that are in your gut, your
responses to individual sweeteners will be different.
So Ran, you have this amazing thing you're saying that one person will respond to saccharin,
but another person will respond to stevia.
But when you look on average across this, what you see amazingly is that there
are lots of people who, when they take these sweeteners, their blood sugar control will
actually get worse. This probably explains your same why when you look at all the historical
scientific studies on sweeteners, they're very confusing. Some say they make you better,
some say they make you sicker, and probably that's because there is this really personalized response because people's microbiomes are so different.
Your studies have focused a lot on diabetes risk, but actually artificial sweeteners could affect
sort of risks of heart disease and other things like that. And then when you came on to the end
about like what to do, I think one positive message was, you know, don't get terrified.
You know, if you're having a can of Diet Coke once a week, don't worry about it.
This isn't something you should be so worried about.
But if you are having a lot of sweeteners, then figuring out how to take that out of
your diet sounds like a good thing.
Particularly watch out for a lot of sweeteners that are hidden in your foods because that's
a big change from in the past.
It's not just in your drinks, it's in many, many foods.
And finally on stevia, this isn't like a wonder sweetener
that solves all of these problems.
There absolutely are people where you've seen
in these studies that it affects
and worsens their blood sugar control.
It sounds like it's probably better than some of the others.
Depends on your microbiome, but again,
I think the main story here is figuring out how to slowly tune this sort of very sweet taste out of your diet allows you to start to take
them out completely.
You nailed it.
Very good.
Wonderful.
Iran, thank you so much.
This was hard to be able to organize.
I'm so glad that we could do it.
I think the research you're doing is amazing and I hope we can tempt you back
in the future because I know you're continuing
to understand how the microbiome interacts with our food and how this impacts our health.
And we would love to have you come back and talk to us again in the future.
Thanks, guys. It's been a pleasure.
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