The Shocking Truth About Artificial Sweeteners
Sugar is often among the first things people ditch in the New Year, and the most common replacement? Artificial sweeteners. But what if replacing sugar with its calorie-free counterpart is actually doing more harm than good? For this episode, we speak to Dr. Jotham Suez, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University, all about artificial sweeteners. How do they work? What are the metabolic effects of artificial sweeteners vs. sugar on our bodies? How do these sugar alternatives potentially negatively affect our microbiome, blood sugar control, and even cause weight gain? Turns out artificial sweeteners might not be so sweet after all.
-
Juna: Happy New Year, guys. One of our favorite times of the year over here at Food. We need to talk. and you're listening
Eddie: Yes. Happy New Year unit. Last year. Do you remember when we did our first ever New Year's resolution series?
Juna: Yes.
Eddie: So every week we covered a different popular New Year's resolution. We covered sugar.
Juna: Yeah. Alcohol.
Eddie: Tell us theme. Yeah. And you guys said, I love it. I think you were referring to the sugar freeze and the alcohol, but also to the episodes that we did.
Juna: So this year we are going to be covering four more of the most popular resolutions since you guys loved that series so much. Now, can you guess what the most commonly made New Year's resolution is?
Eddie: I'm going to go with losing some weight.
Juna: Okay. That's what I thought, too, because it was always my top resolution. But it turns out it's actually to exercise more. Yeah, I know. So I was like, okay, we've done so many full episodes on exercise. Like, what more can we say? So we decided to try something a little bit different. This is a bit of a throwback because Edie has done something of this before, but we have never done it together and that is daily episodes. Okay, so over on our membership, we're going to do 5 minutes a day, little episodes, talking all about exercise, to do a 30 day challenge to get you to your exercise habit.
Eddie: So they'll be dropped every single day in January. We're going to talk about motivation, planning, exercise, getting consistent, and then the actual movement, all of the things that hold back so many people from getting into an exercise habit and reaching their fitness goals in 2024.
Juna: So if you want to join our very own 30 day challenge here, the challenge of putting up with me and Eddie for 30 days in a row.
Eddie: For 5 minutes at a time.
Juna: You can head over to food we need to talk dot com slash membership or click the link in our show notes. But now for today's episode. What are we talking about?
Eddie: Well, you know, you know that we covered sugar last year. Yes. And when people are trying to reduce their sugar intake, what is one of the first things they tried to do?
Juna: Cut out soda.
Eddie: Hopefully. Yeah. Go on.
Juna: Lower their caramel macchiato intake.
Eddie: That worked for you. All right. What else might they want to do?
Juna: Reduce their mini ice cream cones from Trader Joe's.
Eddie: If you're eating them now, that's that's another option. But there's one more. And what we're talking about is actually artificial sweeteners.
Juna: Oh, yeah, that makes sense, because I feel like one of the first things you like, Oh, if I don't drink soda, I'll drink diet soda because you're like, It tastes sweet.
Eddie: And it's kind of like, what do they call these now? A life hack?
Juna: It's like a cheat code, right?
Eddie: Except that almost seems too good to be true, doesn't it?
Juna: On today's episode, are artificial sweeteners good for our health? How do they affect our gut, our blood sugar control, and do they actually potentially cause weight gain? The not so sweet and shocking truth about artificial sweeteners? I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie: And I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna: And you're listening to Food We Need to Talk. The only podcast that has been scientifically proven to sweeten your day, No sugar added. Welcome to today's episode. Today, we're speaking with Dr. Jotham Suez from Johns Hopkins University. And I have to say, Dr. Seuss's when I was looking up artificial sweetener papers, your name was like on every paper, like I was like, this guy is on this is kind of the king of artificial sweetener research. So thank you so much for joining us.
Eddie: Dr.. So is this really sweet?
Juna: Not yes. Dr. Seuss. It's actually sweet. Sweet. So could we first start off by just kind of understanding how artificial sweeteners work? Because I think to us, it really it seems kind of too good to be true.
Jotham: Yeah. So we should consider that when you're thinking about alternatives to sugar, this is quite a chemically broad category. I was talking specifically about the non caloric artificial sweeteners or mostly thinking about saccharin, sucralose, aspartame and a skate plus another one that's called Neo that is not so commonly used, but these are the five ones that, for example, the FDA has approved. But what is true for every molecule that confers a sweet taste, regardless of its chemical structure, is that it is sensed in the taste buds on our tongue by receptor. They are binding to receptors in taste buds on our tongue, and these are sweet taste receptors. So they send a signal of a sweet taste just like sugar, just like regular caloric glucose, fructose sucrose. However, none of them is metabolized in a similar manner to sugar, so they don't participate in the regular metabolic pathways in which we harvest energy from sugar, so they don't provide the sweet energy or specific calories in that sense, because they are not metabolized by the body, they don't contribute any energy. And on top of that, in order to confer sweetness in comparison to just plain white sugar, all of the artificial sweeteners are at least a few hundred 40,000 volts, more sweet than sucrose, meaning that to achieve the same level of sweetness, we need considerably less of the molecule, which means that we in terms of the nutrients that we're putting into the body, we're putting a very low, practically negligible amount of any source of energy. So they confers sweetness because it binds to see this receptor, but they don't participate in any metabolic processes in our body to contribute to energy.
Juna: And are the other sweeteners. So for example, like stevia, monk, fruit and sugar alcohols, are those different than the five that you listed?
Jotham: They're different in several senses. Indeed, some of them can be natural. Some of them were even produced by our own bodies. Some of them are found. So some of the sugar alcohols are found in diets as well. So, for example, in some types of fruit as opposed to the ones that we would describe, the artificial ones are completely only synthesized in the lab. They're not found naturally in any product in nature or they're not synthesized by our own body in terms of their health benefit research. We will go into the later. There's no really clear distinction between this group is better or worse than others. There are no concerns for all of them.
Eddie: Can you go into the history just a little bit? I read some colorful tale about Doc coming home from the lab, forgetting to wash their hands and then touching bread and things.
Jotham: Yes, absolutely true. In fact, that happened at Johns Hopkins University, which I did not know before I joined Johns Hopkins. I knew the story. I did not know that it happened at Johns Hopkins. So most of the history of artificial sweeteners is predominately the history of saccharin. Mm hmm. Many of the other ones only started appearing in the mid 20th century. Saccharin was discovered, as you said, serendipitously by a postdoc named Konstantin Fell Folbigg. I was working in the laboratory in the School of Chemistry. He was working on synthesizing benzene derivatives. As he was working. He then literally took his work home with him. He had his sandwich and he ate the bond. And the bond was surprisingly sweet. And, you know, he was drinking his glass of water. The water was sweet. He was wiping his hand with the napkin and the napkin was sweet. And he realized he brought something from the lab with him. So I hope the safety department, the Johns Hopkins University, does the thing that we're still doing. It's that way. But yeah, so he went back to the lab and he actually tasted everything that he was working on. Oh, my God, I'm not recommending not do that. But this is how they discovered the first alternative to to caloric sugar.
Juna: What is the commercially and for saccharin? Is it Splenda?
Jotham: The most common one would be sweet and low. It's only started to be produced as beta low in 19 1950 something some neat 20th century.
Juna: So when did our idea of artificial sweeteners or the safety around it, when did we start having concerns about them? Because this is just something I've heard colloquially, so don't know if this is true, but I've just heard people say like they've been taken off the market so many times, like the FDA has approved it and then unapproved and then approved it. When was the first indication that we thought like something might be up with artificial sweeteners almost immediately?
Jotham: So the story that I just told about Continued Sheldrake that's happened in the late 19th century, in 1897, I want to say, at Johns Hopkins University and. Almost immediately, saccharin started being introduced into the markets, and almost immediately there were concerns about the safety of Cigarets, not necessarily evidence based concerns. And if they were evidence based, there weren't very striking evidence, but also the evidence for a benefit were more theoretical than actually supported by research. In fact, a lot of life switchers and again, fertility cycling have been going in and out of approved or banned substances is more connected to politics and policy rather than evidence. So, again, a colorful story is that in 1907, an adviser to then President Teddy Roosevelt advised for banning saccharin because of concerns regarding its health impacts. And Teddy Roosevelt, who was overweight. People have have suggested that because he was overweight, he was very strongly against the ban and is very famous for saying anyone who thinks saccharine is injurious to health is an idiot. Oh, so at the time, again, maybe because someone in a very influential position was against the ban of saccharine, this was maybe more politics driven rather than evidence based. That's where we really started to see evidence for negative impacts that those counterintuitive negative effects about weight gain, about control of blood glucose, these are much later on. They started being around in the nineties and of course we're seeing more and more evidence accumulating that maybe they're producing the counterintuitive impact rather than preventing weight gain, preventing in value because they're actually promoting obesity, promoting diabetes.
Eddie: So if we can go down that path, I'm sitting here looking at my receptors on my tongue. They're waiting for something sweet. They don't really, from what you're saying, distinguish between having sucrose or one of these artificial sweeteners. Right. The calories are nonexistent or minimal ish. And the artificial sweeteners take us through. So what could go what could go wrong when you when you have this and how is it maybe we'll take diabetes first? What is it that your body is now doing when it tastes the sweet.
Jotham: The frustrating part, which was also included in the recent World Health Organization report where they actually advised against using artificial sweeteners as a means of preventing weight gain, preventing diabetes, is that they said that the mechanisms for which sweeteners can impact their health in a detrimental manner are still not fully understood. But I can describe some of the things that we think they're doing and what are what is the strength of the evidence. So what happens when our body senses something sweet? Is it it also expects energy, it expects calories. And there is an hypothesis. It has been tested and validated in animal models and to an extent in humans that's maybe uncoupling. It's called the uncoupling theory of uncoupling. The energy from the sweetness basically disrupts the normal response in which the body would produce the various hormones that control our appetites and hormones that control blood glucose, such as insulin. Because we uncouple sweetness from calories, the body does not no longer knows how to properly respond to sweetness, which means that our natural mechanisms of controlling our appetite and the natural mechanisms in which we control blood glucose are disrupted. And therefore when we also consume regular carbohydrates, which we eat anyway, consuming our diets, we would maybe respond in excess or we would not get the same satiety that we are supposed to get from this. This one mechanism, what we're studying is how they impact our body through their impact on God's bacteria. So for many years, as I said, with the exception of aspartame, our body does not metabolize these molecules. We don't have any enzymatic machinery in our body to degrade them. So people thought, well, they're in there. This is why they're safe. What we have found now almost a decade ago is that these substances and a range of them so aspartame, sucralose, saccharin and also stevia, although it's a natural alternative to sugar, we found that these can actually impact gut bacteria. So they changed the makeup of the naturally occurring microorganisms in our body. And we do know that these microbes are important for multiple aspects of our health, including our metabolic health, controlling our weight, controlling blood glucose, how the disruption of gut bacteria is then contributing to the social metabolic. Yeah, that's something that we are looking at right now. We don't know the answer, but we do know that this is a viable that we are able to take these bacteria disrupted by sweeteners, transplant them into an animal and the animal develops diabetes or develops the weight gain just by the fact that we gave it bacteria disrupted by sweeteners. And we have established both in animal models as well as in humans.
Juna: And specifically when you talk about disrupting the microbiome, is it that these artificial sweeteners, are they killing the beneficial bacteria you want the microbiome, or are they promoting the proliferation of bacteria you don't want in the microbiome?
Jotham: So we can definitely say. They're both expanding some, but they're they're supporting their growth and they're also diminishing others. And we have shown that this can happen directly if you try to take these bacteria and culture them and test it with sweeteners, some would flourish, some would die. It's still difficult to say if these are the bad ones. These are the good ones because the microbiome or gut bacteria are so complex, and a microbe that is considered beneficial in some contexts is somewhat sometimes detrimental to others.
Juna: So it's like disrupting. Yeah, it's disrupting like the ratios are like it's like disrupting the balance that would normally be there or something.
Jotham: That is accurate.
Juna: And then what do we know about the effects of artificial sweeteners and wheat? So I think a lot of us, when we think of cutting out sugar for like New Year's resolutions, we're like, okay, like I'm going to instead of just giving up anything sweet, I'm going to switch it with artificial sweeteners to lose weight, whatever. So one of our members from our membership, Lynette, asked about Do artificial sweeteners cause weight gain? I think that's something we've been hearing a lot about recently.
Jotham: We should consider both short term impacts and long term impacts when you're asking whether they're helping us to lose weight or actually causing us to gain weight, there's a vast body of evidence that is associated in nature that suggests that they are contributing to weight gain, which basically is this type of evidence would mean we've looked at people in our study if they're consuming foods and beverages that contain sweeteners, and we say there is a very clear, strong association between consumption of sweeteners and being heavier or also a range of other cardiometabolic diseases. But because these studies are associative, it's hard to say that the sweeteners are causing the weight gain or other people that have some predisposition or are already overweight are consuming sweeteners, and some studies are better at controlling that than others. But it's this doesn't provide a link between sweeteners and weight gain. So the types of study that would provide the link is where you intervene. You ask people to consume sweeteners or something else and see what happens with their weight. So if you do that for the short term and you compare people that consume a white sugar and consume artificial sweeteners in the short term, there is a benefit which makes a lot of sense in replacing sugar with the uncertainty. So you're basically if that's the only dietary change that you're creating, of course you are consuming less calories. So in the short term you will see some weight loss. It's not an impressive weight loss, surprisingly, but you will see a significant weight loss. However, what you're concerned about are the long term impacts. And this is where we think the disruption of gut bacteria or the disruption of the learned responses of insulin production or satiety, This is where these then come into play. And this is why in the long term, we're not seeing that people that consume sweeteners are leaner.
Eddie: And Dr. Suez, on this show, we seem to spend tons of time. We tend to have experts that are fans of large epidemiologic studies. I'm thinking of like the Women's Health Initiative, where you've got tens of thousands of people for tens of years. Do we know anything from studies like that about the long term consumption of artificial sweeteners and effects?
Jotham: Absolutely. So a significant proportion of our evidence for a potential detrimental impact on metabolic health come from these studies. So really large scale studies with tens of thousands of participants followed up for for decades in some cases. And we see a very clear, strong association between consumption of any food and beverage, including a dose response of the more you consume, the more to say, cans of that sort of the individual consumes a day, the larger the risk that they would be overweight or obese or with diabetes.
Juna: So it kind of sounds like just based on the intervention studies, I would say it sounds like the exact population that these sweeteners are marketed towards are the population that should really not be having them because it's going to only further disrupt your glucose metabolism and your appetite. And I don't know, it kind of seems like it only would make the problem you're trying to solve with them worse, if that makes sense.
Jotham: So the challenge with the interventional studies or specific this would be randomized controlled trials is that they are considerably more heterogeneous. And what they report is that in comparison to the observational studies. So if you're if you would just consume those of the studies, you would immediately say, I shouldn't consume artificial sweeteners. But when you're really trying to figure out if sweeteners are causing a negative impact on our health, as some studies would say, yes, they do detrimentally impact metabolic healthy cause weight gain, they cause disruption of glucose tolerance. However, other studies would show they have no impact whatsoever, not the beneficial one or two detrimental one. And there are studies that would show up beneficial effect. So you'll see a whole range of outcomes in these interventional studies. And this is on one hand why it's so difficult to reach conclusive public health recommendations. And also where I think our work on the microbiome is really interesting because it can explain personalized differences.
Eddie: And we'll be right back with Dr. Jotham Suez.
Juna: And we're back with Dr. Jotham Suez from Johns Hopkins University. So I think the big question for all of us is what's the worse of the two sugar artificial sweeteners?
Eddie: I don't boil it right down now.
Juna: Yeah, that's right. That's the big question. Like, is it Should we just. Okay. I think in the ideal world, right, Like we would all just reduce our sugar intake without incorporating artificial sweeteners, Right? Like, maybe that would be, like, just the most ideal. But if people are trying to reduce their sugar intake, do you think sugar plus artificial sweeteners is better than all sugar like is replacing some of your sugar intake with artificial sweeteners worse?
Jotham: So what we do know, and this is very strongly established, is that sugar and especially in the quantities that the average person in an industrialized country consumes is detrimental to our health, no question. MARKS as opposed to sweeteners, that we do have some question marks. So if someone is currently consuming regularly a diet drink, I would absolutely not recommend that they would switch back to a full sugar drink. We do know that that would be detrimental to their metabolic health. Again, no question marks. However, the number of concerns raised with artificial sweeteners suggests that it's hard to say whether they're equally bad as sugar. But there's enough concern that they would say it's probably not a great strategy for losing weight and not a great strategy for controlling blood glucose, and especially if the intention is to reduce sweetness intake across the board because of their intense sweetness. They're probably are getting in the way of that strategy of trying to reduce sweetness across the board. So as frustrating as that recommendation may be, I do think that the best recommendations to try to reduce sweeteners across the board.
Juna: So we actually had a question related to this from one of our membership members, Megan, who asked, Do artificial sweeteners increase your sugar cravings? So can they actually make you want sweeter things because you're having something artificially sweet?
Jotham: Yes. So the answer would be probably to an extent, yes. In humans, in laboratory animals, the answer would be yes. So this relates again to the uncoupling hypothesis where they disrupt satiety. And this would mean that in comparison to a comparable volume of sweetness that you would get from sugar, you would not get the same sense of fullness or satiety. If you're consuming an artificially sweetened product, then you would probably be craving food or carbohydrates sooner rather than later if you would compare it to a meal that actually contains carbohydrates, contains sugar. The evidence in humans are still not super strong, but this theory is definitely validated in laboratory animals.
Juna: So you've kind of touched on this already a little bit, but in your mind, this also comes to our membership. Question. Melissa asked if there is any benefit to doing the more I'd say like quote unquote natural artificial sweeteners or stevia. And I think they're really marketed like, oh, these aren't bad for you because they come from nature. But you're saying because they create the same uncoupling, it's like very similar concerns with all of these, whether or not they come in nature or they're created in a lab.
Jotham: There's still some more research that is required as to the extent to which uncoupling really contributes to detrimental impacts of metabolic health in humans. But another thing to consider is that if our theory that disruption of gut bacteria is that you manage a metabolic health which we have established for stevia as well, then this is something that we need to consider for any sugar alternative to even if we think that it would impact our own body, our own enzymes, their own metabolic processes, do they impact our gut bacteria? And is that impact relevant to metabolic fit for our research? We know the answer is yes, they do in theory, in a way that can detrimentally impact metabolic health. We have not studied model fruits. Unfortunately, there's at this point very little research on one fruit. And I do think we need to see more data there.
Juna: And then another question from one of our patrons.
Eddie: This is a very popular topic. We got a lot of questions.
Juna: So many questions from our membership about this. People are really interested in this. But I think this is like we've all thought this when we've tasted things that are artificially sweetened. Megan asked, Why does Stevia taste so bad? I will extrapolate that. Why do all of these artificial sweeteners like you would think of their binding to the same receptor as sugar, that it would taste the same as sugar, but they do kind of taste different. And some of them also have like this bitter aftertaste or like you can taste that they're not the same as sugar. So why do they taste different if they're binding to the same receptor?
Jotham: Right. So of course I simplified things that the receptor is not one single receptor. It senses all the all sweetener molecules. There are multiple ways, multiple regions in the receptors that could sense different molecules differently. The result would always be a sweet taste. But how that sweet? Is this perceived is different. In fact, if you think about aspartame are sweetness receptors in our body, in the human body, recognize aspartame, sweetness, receptors in rats do not recognize aspartame. They don't sense it is sweet, although it does bind to the same receptors in mice. So there's a lot of precision there as to how exactly the molecules recognize and to add complexity some sense not just by sweetness receptor, but also by bitter taste receptors. And this is why they produce a more complex sensation of taste.
Juna: Okay, cool. So when we're talking about sweeteners and we a little bit touched on this when we talked about how it might increase your cravings for sweeteners, but you said that the ideal would be to like decrease your overall sweetness stuff intake, whether it's like artificial or real sugar or whatever. We have seen now in research that if you start consuming less sweet things, your cravings for sweet things will go down and your threshold of like how much sweetness you need to feel satisfied also decreases, right? Like it's not like a fixed thing that like if you have a massive sweet tooth, you'll have it forever.
Jotham: This is our working hypothesis of the way brain in both past war doing basic sciences, but also people in the field of nutrition, people in the field of public health are working hypothesis and there are evidence to back it is that it is possible to impact sweetness cravings by reducing sweetness. But I have to say that it is a working hypothesis. We still need to see stronger evidence that this is what happens, but we don't have at the moment evidence to the contrary. So we don't see that this can have any negative impact. So even if it's not well established, it's not a bad strategy considering the knowledge is frequently asked.
Juna: Okay, And do we know how long that takes? Like a weeks long process are like years long process.
Jotham: This this is where we we need more data.
Juna: Okay. Got it. Okay. Sorry. I was. I was trying to give her a break. Like it's only two weeks with no sugar. You can do it.
Eddie: Although people like two intensive lifestyle medicine programs where you go to a spot and your food is prepared for you report the people appreciably change very quickly. I mean, okay, That's what that's what I don't know. There's not controlled studies for this.
Juna: I mean, I feel like when me and my sister have done like we'll do one week, no sugar, even one week, you go back and you're like, Whoa, these things are crazy. So you didn't even realize it.
Eddie: And as we wrap up here, you've mentioned the microbiome a number of times, but what lies ahead in the research realm?
Jotham: I think what's really we find very exciting is that an important piece about the microbiome is that each one of us has a different makeup of the microbiome. So you and I will have different microbes in our gut, and we know that this then produces two personalized or differential responses to practically anything. If you and I, it's the same slice of widespread, we might respond differently because of the differences in our gut microbes and along the same lines of. But what our research shows is that these differences in microbiome also lead to differences in how we respond to artificial sweeteners. So if you and I drink Splenda, for example, this might have a negative impact on my blood glucose, but not in yours because we have different microbes. So that's contribution of the microbiome to personalized differences is this is what we're trying to understand exactly how that works. And if we can develop tools to maybe predict which individuals would be at risk or ways to intervene in those pathways for which the microbiome contributes to a detrimental impact on metabolic health.
Juna: Amazing. And then can I just ask you personally, do you have do you intake artificial sweeteners or are you like.
Eddie: What are you having at your next breath? Yeah.
Juna: What do you yeah, what do you do yourself.
Jotham: For a period, especially after our first study published back in 2014, I tried to avoid it completely. I was never much of a consumer of either regular soda or diet soda, so that was relatively easy. Today, my only source of exposure to fish is protein powders, which is where it is. It's extremely difficult to find protein powders with other visual sweeteners.
Juna: Can we talk about the effect that artificial sweeteners may have on heart disease and also cancer? I'm not sure if that's actually been shown in studies, but you briefly mentioned heart disease.
Jotham: Yes. So in terms of heart disease, most of the evidence that we have are again, from associated studies, and this would probably be sweeteners contributing to elevated risk for heart disease because they're contributing to elevated risk of weight gain or disruption of glucose tolerance, because we know that being overweight or having obesity is then contributing to elevated risk for heart disease. But what we also saw in a very large study it was published recently is specifically, I want to call it erythritol. So residual is a sugar alcohol that is also often mixed in stevia. The offers of that study, they're from the Cleveland Clinic. They were able to to show a very clear association between the intake of that molecule and heart disease. And they actually were able to demonstrate a mechanism, although they have demonstrated a mechanism in the lab and in the. Animals and the dates to be determined whether that mechanism does occur in humans. But it adds another level of evidence to our concern that you already had based on associated studies is in the context of heart disease.
Juna: Know you're breaking my heart because my favorite protein bar, I think the main sweetener is erythritol is.
Jotham: Extremely prevalent as a result.
Juna: Oh, okay. Yeah. I think it because it tastes less bad than other ones. Yeah. Can we talk about cancer? Sure.
Jotham: So this is very timely topic. So just very recently, World Health Organization has announced that aspartame is a potential carcinogen, which caused a lot of concern among consumers. But when we break down to what actually happened, they said there are evidence for being potentially carcinogenic, so contributing to tumor formation in cancer, but also not in the dose that we don't need to change to safe dose that what is today defined as a safe dose, which in humans would probably translate to 12 to 14 cans of a diet soda for an adult that is still safe. So unless you're consuming 12 to 14 cans a day, if you're an adult, then probably you don't need to be concerned, at least according to the evidence. To where I would say this is important is when you think about teenagers and especially children, where to get to the dose only needs maybe 2 to 3 times a day. And that's definitely something that we see children consuming. So something to to to think about.
Juna: The other thing that complicates this, though, I know people always talk about this dosage thing about how in studies when they show detrimental effects of dosages so high and like a human would never be having this much in Baba Wawa, But it's like, okay, yes, I'm not having 14 cans of soda a day, but there was a time when I was having pre-workout every day that was artificially sweetened. I was also having because then I was having a protein bar. I was also having a scoop of protein powder. Then at the end of the day, I would add stevia to my yogurt. So it's like, yeah, like it was throughout my day, all these different things that I thought of as all different types of stuff. They all had artificial sweeteners. So I think that's the danger where it's like, yeah, we're not all having diet soda all day, but it's like we are having all these other things that we don't really think about are artificially sweetened.
Jotham: Absolutely. So both us and others that are doing human research in the context of artificial sweeteners, often we try to recruit participants to our studies that don't consume sweeteners in their habitual diet. So we want them to be kind of negative to sweeteners to really see the new impact that sweeteners can have on our diet. And the way to to find these individuals is to ask them about the frequency in which they consume various foods that contain sweeteners. And when we have done that for our recent study published back in 2022, we have interviewed 1300 individuals to find 120 that would suggest that 90% were not even aware of how much sweeteners they're consuming. And another US study that was published in 2017 found they use a slightly different approach to to determine if people are exposed to seniors. And they found that a lot of people are exposed to sucrose without even knowing that they're consuming sucralose. So these are definitely a lot of products. I know we're not trying to scare anyone, but definitely they're not just in in diet sodas. And I would also comment about the studies. So some studies do indeed contain high quantities because you have to start somewhere. For example, when we were asking if there's any impact on gut bacteria, we didn't know where to begin. So we did start with a high dose, but then we had a follow up study with a dose that was more similar to what humans might consume on a daily basis. So I think there are definitely studies showing detrimental impacts even with doses that are definitely feasible for daily consumption.
Juna: Got it. Do you think replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners is a good news resolution? And if not, what do you think is a better news resolution that people should spend their energy on?
Jotham: Yeah, I you don't think that it's a good New Year's resolution. I think people might see a benefits over the month of January. But what happens after January? That's a good question. And they can interrupt any efforts to reduce the intake of sweetness across the board and control hunger and satiety better. So I think a good news resolution would be to try to gradually, gradually decrease the intake of sweetness across the board so maybe puts one less teaspoon of anything sweetened in your beverage or even half less and see how that works for you over maybe a relatively long period of time. So you don't you know, you started the New Year on a sweet note.
Eddie: May you have a sweet New Year, but then maybe a little less.
Juna: Exactly. Okay. Thank you so much, Dr. Sue, as this is so awesome. And so when you had questions, I'm so glad we got to address them all.
Eddie: Thank you for making it short and sweet as well.
Juna: Yes. Yes.
Jotham: Thank you.
Juna: Thank you so much to Dr. Suez for coming on today's episode. We will link to his work on our website, Food We Need To Tor.com. If you want daily episodes every single day of January, join the foodie fam at food we eat tor.com slash membership. You can find us at food. We talk on Instagram. You can find me at the official Yoona and Yuna Jara on YouTube and Tik Tok. You can find Eddie.
Eddie: Really carefully reading all those labels and finding the artificial sweeteners.
Juna: Oh, no. That's going to take forever. All the secret hidden, artificial.
Eddie: I know what to look for now.
Juna: Food. We need to talk the production of PR X.
Eddie: Our senior producer is Morgan Flannery, and our producers are Megan after Matt and Samantha Gattseck.
Juna: Tommy Bazarian is our mix engineer.
Eddie: Jocelyn Gonzales is executive producer for P r X Productions.
Juna: Food We Need to Talk was co-created by Carrie Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie: For any personal health questions, please consult your personal health provider. Thanks for listening.
