[HN Gopher] The artificial sweetener erythritol and cardiovascul...
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The artificial sweetener erythritol and cardiovascular event risk
Author : rswerve
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-02-27 19:43 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Fascinating, I'm a heavy consumer of this stuff and I would love
| to know how valid this research is. If it's solid work, I guess
| it's bye bye to a lot of products that felt guilt-free.
| foxyv wrote:
| They think that erythritol increases platelet activity which
| may cause thrombosis. They have proven that erythritol does
| affect platelet reactivity. However the study doesn't prove it
| adequately to say that it definitively causes thrombosis. That
| would require a follow up study. They have some correlation in
| data from people with cardiac disease, but it's not surprising
| to see erythritol there because a lot of cardiac disease is
| caused by type 2 diabetes.
|
| Without further study there is no way to say if there is an
| increased risk of thrombosis from this data alone. Just enough
| to say they should perform further studies to make a
| determination. In most cases with these studies, the increased
| risk of thrombosis would so low that you could offset it by
| taking a walk once a week.
|
| I personally won't stop my consumption of erythritol on this
| data alone, but there ARE other sweeteners. I mostly use Stevia
| myself.
| latchkey wrote:
| Many/most of the monk fruit 'sweetener' products contain it as
| an additive. Super annoying since monk fruit itself doesn't
| need it.
| vosper wrote:
| Most "monk fruit" sweetener I've seen actually has erythritol
| as the main ingredient, which just a small amount of monk
| fruit. Presumably this is to get away with calling it "monk
| fruit sweetener" which appeals to the idea that it's somehow
| a more "natural" product.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Even my stevia sweetener has erythritol as its first
| ingredient, so this has to be ubiquitous. Back to Splenda I
| guess?
| bloaf wrote:
| I, for one, am confused why people choose erythritol over
| allulose.
| outworlder wrote:
| They usually don't. But if you get something like monk fruit,
| you only need a tiny amount. Erythritol is often added so it
| will look more like sugar.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Well, this sucks. I use this in my coffee and a smidge on my
| oatmeal.
|
| Is there an artificial sweetener left that doesn't cause issues?
| Splenda was associated with CVD so that's why I switched.
| bloaf wrote:
| Allulose? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psicose
| sva_ wrote:
| Back when I still used sugar I found Xylitol pretty neat. It
| has about 1/2 of the calories of normal sugar but mostly tastes
| the same (I actually prefer it to 'real' sugar by taste). There
| are some claims about health benefits but I remain skeptical
| about them.
|
| All in all, I decided pretty early on that eating stuff that
| tastes extremely sweet but does not cause the associated
| glucose spike is a weird way of fooling one's body, and it just
| doesn't seem like a great idea to me...
|
| Reducing sugar/overly sweet stuff intake has this nice by-
| effect that everything else starts tasting much, much more
| intense. I'm very much into savory stuff nowadays, and when I
| sometimes let someone trick me into trying something sweet, I
| usually regret it - purely based on the disappointing taste.
| jsnell wrote:
| There should be no question about xylitol being beneficial
| for dental health. (Not just less harmful than sugar, but
| actively beneficial.)
| Axien wrote:
| Ugh. Splenda has been my go to sweetener for 15 years now.
| mrmincent wrote:
| Instead of a sweetener maybe try a sprinkle of cinnamon in your
| oats.
| stavros wrote:
| Aspartame?
| outworlder wrote:
| No! Aspartame is known to cause _serious_ issues for decades
| now, even before it was finally approved by the FDA.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Oh? Who is that 'known' by? Certainly not any of the over
| 100 regulatory agencies around the world who have made
| aspartame one of the _most studied compounds on earth_.
| Unless you have PKU or migraines there is literally no
| widely accepted science that says otherwise.
| Axien wrote:
| Aspartame is linked to an 18% increase in stroke:
|
| https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/sugar-
| substitute...
| baal80spam wrote:
| Isn't this a many times debunked myth that just keep coming
| back?
| causality0 wrote:
| Saccharin, aka good old fashioned Sweet n Low.
| vosper wrote:
| If it's not too many cups of coffee each day, and just a smidge
| on your oatmeal, then could you use regular sugar?
| 404mm wrote:
| I assume you make oatmeal with water, right? Try to make it
| with milk (2% is fine) instead of water. Probably not the
| healthiest alternative but I think better than sugar or
| sweetener.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Abstinence.
|
| Hear me out.
|
| I have never had such sweet bread as I had after being on Keto
| for a year. As in actual Ketosis, doctor verified.
|
| When I started eating "normal" again, lots of things tasted way
| sweeter than I remembered. But like saltiness and other things
| you get used to it.
| 404mm wrote:
| I can attest to this. You don't even have to avoid all carbs.
| Just cut out sweet sugary stuff and things will start tasting
| sweeter. It works with salt too.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I cut down on salt and eating out now kind of sucks,
| everything tastes like a salt stick.
| latchkey wrote:
| It is either that or stuff is loaded with butter. I can't
| think of a single restaurant that I've been to in the last
| two years that I crave going to again. I keep thinking it
| is the area I live in or the places I've been, but at the
| end of the day, I think I'm just spoiled by cooking at
| home.
| koolba wrote:
| You can also force the contrast by having something bitter,
| like unsweetened black coffee, before something not normally
| considers sweet, like bread.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The holy grail of sweetners is left handed sugar. Basically a
| regular glucose molecule but flipped. Tastes identical to sugar
| but cannot be metabolized.
|
| The catch is that no one has found a way to synthesize it
| cheaply.
| mikece wrote:
| [flagged]
| outworlder wrote:
| I'm pretty sure what you mean but the rate of cardiovascular
| issues has been increasing for decades, at least since the
| 70's.
|
| The actual politically sensitive possibility is sugar (and even
| more so, high fructose corn syrup). There's a lot of money
| involved there.
| jsnell wrote:
| The studies this paper is based on were started 20 years ago.
| Does your conspiracy theory include time machines?
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| Which you're also being a little coy about for some reason.
| parvenu74 wrote:
| Perhaps (s)he's concerned about political backlash (via down-
| voting) on HN?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| You cannot lose that many magical internet points on a
| single post, so don't worry about it.
| rom-antics wrote:
| I'm sure he can spare some of his 19876 internet points,
| just say it FSS
| mikece wrote:
| And my comment has been flagged. Too coy now?
| [deleted]
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| Weird. It has no effect on survival in rats and the doses were
| large.
|
| > One chronic (78-weeks) study in rats with dietary levels of 0,
| 1, 3, or 10% erythritol (equal to > 0.46, 1.4 and 5 g/kg bw/day
| for males and 0, 0.54, 1.7 and 5.7 g/kg bw/day for females) (Til
| > and van Nesserooij, 1994) and another 2-year chronic
| toxicity/carcinogenicity study in rats > with dietary levels of
| erythritol of 0, 2, 5, or 10% (equal to 0, 0.9, 22, and 4.6 g/kg
| bw/day for > males and 0, 1.0, 2.6, and 5.4 g/kg bw/day) (Lina et
| al., 1994; 1996) demonstrated that > erythritol did not affect
| survival and had no carcinogenic effect.
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/food/fs/sc/scf/out175_en.pdf
|
| From this paper:
|
| > In a population-based prospective cohort study with repeated
| dietary records, ingestion of multiple artificial sweeteners (for
| example, aspartame, acesulfame potassium and sucralose) was
| associated with CVD risk.
|
| Ok, let's look at that reference.
|
| > Results Total artificial sweetener intake was associated with
| increased risk of cardiovascular diseases (1502 events, hazard
| ratio 1.09, 95% confidence interval 1.01 to 1.18, P=0.03);
| absolute incidence rate in higher consumers (above the sex
| specific median) and non-consumers was 346 and 314 per 100 000
| person years, respectively. Artificial sweeteners were more
| particularly associated with cerebrovascular disease risk (777
| events, 1.18, 1.06 to 1.31, P=0.002; incidence rates 195 and 150
| per 100 000 person years in higher and non-consumers,
| respectively). Aspartame intake was associated with increased
| risk of cerebrovascular events (1.17, 1.03 to 1.33, P=0.02;
| incidence rates 186 and 151 per 100 000 person years in higher
| and non-consumers, respectively), and acesulfame potassium and
| sucralose were associated with increased coronary heart disease
| risk (730 events; acesulfame potassium: 1.40, 1.06 to 1.84,
| P=0.02; incidence rates 167 and 164; sucralose: 1.31, 1.00 to
| 1.71, P=0.05; incidence rates 271 and 161).
|
| This study shows the same thing with _all_ artificial sweeteners,
| and has way more people (n=103,388) than the present Nature study
| (n=1,157). And we know that erythritol is often used by type 2
| diabetics due to its low effect on insulin levels. That
| population is predisposed to cardiac events to begin with.
|
| When adjusting the US/EU cohorts for cardiovascular risk factors,
| the observed effect with erythritol are smaller and closer to
| this study of other artificial sweeteners.
|
| > Consistent with the results observed within the discovery
| cohort (adjusted HR = 2.95 (1.70-5.12) P < 0.001; Fig. 1 and
| Supplementary Table 4), the association between erythritol levels
| (fourth quartile versus first quartile) and incident MACE risk
| remained significant in both US and European validation cohorts
| following adjustments for cardiovascular risk factors (adjusted
| HR (95% CI) = 1.80 (1.18-2.77) and 2.21 (1.20-4.07), P = 0.007
| and P = 0.010, respectively
|
| I'm not convinced of the validity of this study. They ignored the
| rat chronic toxicity data and proposed a mechanism for what they
| saw in a small cohort of humans, but it should be reproducible in
| mammals.
| DantesKite wrote:
| Well, no worries for me. I found out years ago I'm allergic to
| this stuff the hard way.
|
| Gave me hives all over my face for a few hours. Intensely itchy.
|
| Now whenever I drink something new, I always look out for it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Have you had to adjust your diet to eliminate natural sources
| as well, or does the reaction only happen for high
| concentrations?
| DantesKite wrote:
| It seems to only happen in drinks with high concentrations.
|
| Like this one.
|
| https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.960552358.html
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I just avoid artificial sweetener as a category. They all taste
| like chemicals to me anyway. I used to drink a lot of Diet Coke
| but have hardly touched it for years. It tastes like weed killer
| to me now.
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(page generated 2023-02-27 23:00 UTC)