[HN Gopher] Sweetener saccharin shows surprise power against ant...
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Sweetener saccharin shows surprise power against antibiotic
resistance
Author : XzetaU8
Score : 99 points
Date : 2025-04-05 14:07 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brunel.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brunel.ac.uk)
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Isn't saccharine toxic?
| jinwoo68 wrote:
| I think so. Seems also toxic to bacteria!
| boxed wrote:
| The dose makes the poison. It doesn't sound THAT toxic, but
| enough to be a bad idea for sweeteners. But I'd bet the
| antibiotic itself has more toxicity!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There were some suspected links to cancer but they were found
| to not be a risk at normal intake levels.
| nottorp wrote:
| So is any prescription pill if you're not respecting the dosage
| the docs prescribed...
| ignoramous wrote:
| It is banned in India for Ice Creams & frozen Lollies / Ice
| Pops, but allowed within limit for general use (soda, bubble
| gums, packaged juice, etc). Health department
| officials said, "Saccharin is harmful to children especially
| those under 14 years. It affects bones badly. These ice candies
| are sold in rural areas and their sale picks up during summer"
| Some ice cream producers prefer to use saccharin as it is quite
| cheaper in comparison to sugar. To earn heavy profits during
| summer when the demand for ice candies goes up significantly,
| some of the ice cream producers use saccharin. Officials said
| that saccharin is more than 300 times sweeter than sucrose
| (sugar), the officials said.
|
| https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/ice-cream-pr...
| / https://archive.vn/wRTE5
| teslabox wrote:
| Saccharin was the first artificial sweetener, discovered in 1879.
| It was popular in the early 20th century, and is available today
| as Sweet'n'Low or "the pink packet" (generics). The chemical has
| an advocacy group: https://saccharin.org/ - the latest news is
| that Canadians can now use saccharin too (2016). Walmart and
| Amazon have boxes of bulk sweet'n'low for baking/etc.
|
| ~4 weeks ago I reposted a submission about Aspartame: _Aspartame
| aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation
| (sciencedirect.com)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313574
|
| My comment tried to put saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame
| potassium and sucralose into context. Aspartame is not heat
| stable, so it's often combined with acesulfame-K. The diet soda
| industry standardized on aspartame in the 1980's because
| saccharin has a metallic aftertaste.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313575
|
| I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial
| sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners)
| are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.
|
| If you want to try saccharin-sweetened beverages, I've noticed
| that zero sugar tonic waters at my local grocery store (brand
| name and generic) use saccharin.
| Centigonal wrote:
| One important thing to mention about the history of saccharin
| is that it was the subject of a big scare in the 70s and 80s
| because rat studies showed it caused cancer. Later research
| revealed that the link between saccharin and cancer was much
| more tenuous in humans than originally suggested, and the
| sweetener is generally considered safe today.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| When I was a kid in the 70s, our pantry had a bottle of
| saccharine tablets that my folks would use to sweeten their
| coffee. They were tiny, not big tablets, more like round
| little pills. They had an uncanny resemblance to a popular
| breath mint product.
|
| A common prank was to put some saccharine pills in one of
| those mint dispensers, walk up to a sibling and asked if they
| wanted one while putting a real mint in your mouth. They'd
| take one of the fake mints, put it in their mouth, and half a
| second later curse you as they ran to the sink to spit it
| out.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I still have a little bottle of those, sold under the brand
| "Aids".
| SoftTalker wrote:
| All these artificial sweeteners taste terrible to me. A very
| "chemical" taste and especially smell to all of them, reminds
| me of insecticide. For carbonated beverages, I prefer plain
| carbonated water, though sometimes I will buy a flavored (but
| unsweetened) variety.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I've settled on no sugar or under 3g of sugar for this
| reason. They all taste weird to me. Monk fruit, stevia,
| aspartame, saccharin, allulose, sucralose. All of them.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| They taste weird to me too but I'm not convinced it's an
| absolute quality rather than just unfamiliarity
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm only quibbling here, and I agree with you, but an amusing
| factoid is that the ancient Romans used lead acetate as an
| artificial sweetener. It was made by boiling wine in a lead
| pot.
|
| When I lived in Texas, it was practically universal to open up
| a cup of iced tea, grab several packs of Sweet'n'Low, rip the
| tops off all at once, and pour them in.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| With Sweet'n'Low?! Isn't that considered blasphemy in sweet
| tea country?
| analog31 wrote:
| That's a good question, and I'm culturally ignorant. When I
| lived in Texas, my impression was that "tea" was
| unsweetened iced tea, to which people added their own
| sweetener. Then when I visited Virginia, "tea" was heavily
| sweetened.
|
| My friend told me that drinking coffee with a meal
| instantly identified me as a Midwesterner.
| chasil wrote:
| Google Gemini is telling me:
|
| "Saccharin is absorbed primarily in the stomach, with about 85%
| to 95% of ingested saccharin absorbed and eliminated in the
| urine."
|
| If this is the case, then why hasn't the antibiotic effect been
| previously observed in vivo?
|
| Is the concentration too low?
| latchkey wrote:
| My problem with monk fruit extracts is that they tend to be
| full of erythritol (even listing them as the first ingredient
| [0]), which tends to wreck my stomach. I was in a super market
| once and not a single product on the shelf was pure monk fruit.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/RAW-Natural-Sweetener-Erythritol-
| Suga...
| hinkley wrote:
| I think they're using erythritol because it's not toxic to
| pets which some of the other sugar alcohols are, and
| disastrously so.
|
| But all of the sugar alcohols can mess with your gut biome.
| Mine went nasty during the previous recession when I was
| chewing gum for TMJ related problems.
| latchkey wrote:
| I'm confused, google says monk fruit is ok for pets.
| Regardless, who's feeding this stuff to their pets?
|
| I love fishermans friend, but I think the sorbitol is
| guaranteed excessive flatulence.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Monkfruit doesn't come in a nice, familiar crystal form,
| and monkfruit extract is much sweeter per gram than
| sugar. For this reason, manufacturers bulk it up with
| some kind of sugar alcohol to make it easier to use. GP
| is saying they use erythritol for this purpose because
| the other options (e.g. xylitol) are toxic to pets.
| hinkley wrote:
| When you live with a pet, who eats what food is a bit of
| a democratic affair, not an autocracy.
|
| Do you want to get up from the middle of a movie to go to
| the bathroom and come back and find that you're not going
| to find out who killed the leading lady tonight because
| you're going to spend all night in an animal emergency
| room getting your dog or cat's stomach pumped?
|
| Anything on a table or in your purse or your jacket
| pocket is fair game.
| officeplant wrote:
| - I was chewing gum for TMJ related problems.
|
| Why the hell would you do that? My life time of chewing gum
| constantly until my 20s is what I assume to be the source
| of my TMJ.
| hinkley wrote:
| Grinding my teeth at night, because I wanted to murder a
| third of my coworkers and I didn't feel I could find
| another job.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Xylitol is probably safer, and it also kills smutans.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Hate the taste of the stuff, but glad to hear this.
|
| Wonder if some megacorp will try to patent some formulation of
| it.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Saccharin adderallide
| jader201 wrote:
| These days, about the only liquid you can consume without
| controversy is water.
|
| Some say coffee is good for you (in moderation), some say it's
| bad for you.
|
| Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in
| moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.
|
| Some say some artificial sweeteners have benefits, some say all
| of them are toxic.
|
| Some think fruit juices are good for you, because fruit. Some
| (most) say they're bad for you.
|
| Some say fruit smoothies are good for you, because the fiber
| content outweighs the downside of fructose/natural sugars. But
| some say all fruit sugar is bad for you.
|
| The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of
| beverage containing sucrose is bad for you. But maybe I missed
| some thread where sucrose in moderation actually has health
| benefits.
|
| I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a
| reason why that's bad for me.
| butlike wrote:
| In worrying about it all you miss all the earthly delights AND
| you STILL don't live forever
| anonzzzies wrote:
| People worry about where the drinking water is from and how
| it's transported etc as well. Whatever you do, you will die
| soon-ish. I prefer to enjoy the journey.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Haha, you made me chuckle. But to the facts: the article and
| application is about directly applying it to the wound or
| antibiotics directly. No one is advocating for it to be part of
| a healthy diet.
| ender341341 wrote:
| > Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in
| moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.
|
| From what I've read it seems likely that any amount of alcohol
| is bad for you, most of the studies that show moderate as good
| for you make the mistake of only have 'sober', 'moderate' &
| 'heavy' drinking, but if you look at the 'sober' folks there's
| a heavy mix of "I don't drink because I'm in recovery" or other
| health issues, so if you instead of 'sober by choice', 'sober
| by recovery/health issues', 'moderate' & 'heavy drinker' the
| benefit of moderation reverses to being worse than 'sober by
| choice'.
|
| Almost any "this bad for you thing is actually good for you in
| moderation" basically seem to come down to:
|
| People who can do common addictive things in moderation tend to
| also be good at moderating other bad factors too.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| It depends ? Has your line adapted to alcohol, like other
| lines adapted to milk?
| omnimus wrote:
| Alcohol is bad for your body but can be quite good for your
| mood. Just like sugar or othe high calory food.
| meroes wrote:
| But if the water has fluoride...maybe that's making your teeth
| brittle! (Or worse if you're condemned to believe RFK types)
| leoh wrote:
| >I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a
| reason why that's bad for me.
|
| Micro-plastics, fluoride.. ;)
| bko wrote:
| Naw, that's just big waters psy-op getting you to buy their
| nectar to fill up the Pacific ocean with plastic.
|
| In all seriousness, I met people that essentially don't drink
| water. They get water through food. Give them a glass during
| dinner and it goes untouched. I don't think it's because
| they're lazy and don't want to get up and fill up their water.
| It's just that they're not thirsty. It's really quite
| fascinating
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| > These days, about the only liquid you can consume without
| controversy is water.
|
| Tapwater, or artesian well water?
|
| Magnitically left-spun water, or ionically charged crystal-
| dipped water?
|
| Hermetically sealed water, or Gnostically gestated water?
|
| Distilled or deionated?
|
| Choose wisely.
| queuebert wrote:
| The residents of Flint, MI, might disagree with you.
| nineplay wrote:
| The 'no fruit juice' thing really got on my nerves when my kids
| were little since people just throw it out with no
| qualifications. So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze
| the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit =
| sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and
| nutrition.
|
| I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into
| smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no
| one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are
| not nutritionists.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup
| I can 't give it to my kid_
|
| Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices
| (especially when served with the pulp).
| timcobb wrote:
| With pulp we're getting somewhere, but without pulp?
| damnesian wrote:
| there is still the folate and magnesium citrate. and of
| course vitamin c. It's not completely useless without
| pulp.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices
| (especially when served with the pulp).
|
| Yes they are.
|
| And when it comes down to it a little bit of fiber
| especially when something has been aggressively mashed up,
| doesn't make your orange juice all that different from a
| Mtn Dew. Fructose is fructose and no amount of magical
| extras is going to make that big of a difference on its
| metabolic effects.
|
| I say that but I'm _not_ advocating you to not drink juice.
| Just balance your inputs.
| nineplay wrote:
| People below you in this thread are saying that fresh
| squeezed orange juice is little better than Mountain Dew.
| Something about nutrition makes people lose their minds.
| smt88 wrote:
| They are correct in terms of nutrition and sugar, but
| most kids can process a lot of sugar fine.
|
| Fruit has also been bred to be much sweeter and less
| nutritious than it was 50 years ago, so there's that too.
|
| Moderation is the key to everything.
| nineplay wrote:
| I agree but no one makes headlines or sells books by
| talking about nuance and moderation so we get terrible
| advice from magazines and 'professionals' and all get
| steadily less healthy.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _fresh squeezed orange juice is little better than
| Mountain Dew_
|
| A reasonable way to look at it is as a flat, fortified
| Mountain Dew. Great as a treat. Bad as a habit, at least
| with modern oranges.
| nineplay wrote:
| That is an impossibly stupid way to look at it. Food is
| not just a bunch of numbers on a label.
| wao0uuno wrote:
| By squeezing juice out of an orange you're separating the
| unhealthy stuff from the healthy stuff. Healthy stuff
| then gets thrown away. Some juice every now and then
| won't hurt anyone but it's not healthy to drink it every
| day.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into
| smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no
| one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are
| not nutritionists.
|
| I'd just suggest nobody get nutritional advice. Really so
| much of it is just nonsense and there's no good advice in my
| opinion outside "eat a variety of food in moderation" unless
| you have specific health problems. If a health professional
| told me that blending fruit into smoothies removes
| nutritional value I'd make it a point to try to get them
| fired. (I have gotten healthcare professionals fired, but for
| more serious stupid statements)
| nineplay wrote:
| I don't entirely disagree but my kid was with me and I feel
| like I need someone now to reassure her that blending
| doesn't magically remove vitamins from food.
|
| ( I asked her if blending tomatoes for sauce removed the
| nutritional value but that's different for reasons that no
| one understands. )
|
| I'm with you. Eat a variety of food and as close to the
| natural source as possible. If you think that orange juice
| and mountain dew are the same because of sugar content than
| you've lost the plot.
| timcobb wrote:
| > So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice
| into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar =
| bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and
| nutrition.
|
| Sorta? It's not _bad_ , right? But it has not much
| nutritional value, and spikes their glycemic index, which is
| probably fine but... why? I guess it does taste good...
| nineplay wrote:
| Because no one wants to drink water all day every day and
| nothing else.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| It probably has to do with not being American, but at
| least here in italy it's completely fine to drink water
| and only that on a regular day. I do give that there's
| probably more variety, I know some people having
| preferences for certain bottled waters over others
|
| (I'll gladly drink whatever water I find, but I'm not a
| fan of the plastic taste of some bottled waters and
| definitely a hater of refrigerator-cold water)
|
| From my holidays in the US I recall shops, even small
| ones, having lots of drinks. Like, shelves and shelves of
| any alcohol free drink (and some abv ones) one could
| imagine. Here I go to my neighborhood small supermarket
| and there's coke, lemonade, Fanta, tonic water, a few
| local products such as spuma and that's it
| nineplay wrote:
| I drink water in the US every day just fine, I don't
| think there's anything cultural going on here.
|
| No one drinks coffee or tea or beer or wine in Italy? Pop
| culture has deceived me.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Oh well coffee is definitely a given for a lot of
| Italians lol. Tea as well although less spread than
| coffee. I was talking more about drinks taken in cans or
| bigger quantities than a coffee/cup of tea.
|
| Wine is definitely more prevalent in the older gens,
| young people drink albeit less. Up until a few years ago
| - and in some older people is valid for today as well -
| there was the belief that a small glass of wine a day
| wouldn't do harm, or that it had a positive effect on
| your health...
|
| So yeah, alcohol is often on the table, but there's much
| less choice about the variety of drinks compared in the
| us. Then, if you have to work in the afternoon you might
| choose to not drink alcohol, so you're stuck with water
| or the other more common soft drinks such as coke (...)
| nineplay wrote:
| I'm specifically sympathetic to kids who are not ( in the
| US ) given coffee or tea or alcohol and still get scolded
| about having anything but water. I've been there, it gets
| dull.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Well, even small kids here are allowed by their parents
| to drink caffe latte, which is milk with varying amounts
| of coffee. Then of course, some juices are OK although
| it's so easy to drink much more than the rda (and I'm
| quite sure I drank a shitton more of the recommend dose
| of juice, the few times I drank juice)
| wao0uuno wrote:
| I don't see anything wrong with drinking only water.
| nineplay wrote:
| Nothing is wrong with drinking only water. Nothing is
| wrong with drinking something besides water.
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| > if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I
| can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad?
|
| Yeah, that's fine, but a 16 ounce glass of orange juice has
| way more than one orange in it, and it's got a hell of a lot
| of sugar.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The real issue with fruit juice is that you can easily
| consume the juice of several pieces of fruit all at once and
| in a form that makes the sugar rapidly available so you get
| insulin spikes. The serving size for children of juice is
| 4-6oz which isn't very much volume, so its super easy to over
| do it.
|
| If you eat the whole fruit that sugar s bound up with fiber
| so you don't consume as much as easily and you digest it more
| slowly. Fiber plays a key role in satiety (feeling full) and
| stripped of fiber its easy to consume too many calories. A
| whole orange contains 3-6x the fiber of the equivalent volume
| of orange juice with pulp.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Or just do like me and switch to grapefruit juice. Awesome
| without drinking pure liquid sugar.
| colechristensen wrote:
| How about we agree that people making food controversial are
| the problem and we can just ignore them. It's like they have a
| religion that refreshes its beliefs on a 5 year cycle.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| A secular religion, replacing a million
| ourFatherWhoYouAreInHeaven to prevent the dwindling disease,
| with a milliin microfastings.. it lacks the little whips for
| self flaggelation though.
| sionisrecur wrote:
| Sorry, water has microplastics now.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| The only way to prevent it, is to go full recycle, become a
| human bottle garden .
| RC_ITR wrote:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4109571/
|
| We don't even know if _tiny doses or artificial radiation_ are
| good or bad for you.
|
| That's the straw that just pushed me to live my life.
| deepGem wrote:
| I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a
| reason why that's bad for me.
|
| Here's one :)
|
| Too much water also erodes your body of salts. If you already
| are on a low salt diet this could be a problem. For us Indians
| eating mountain loads of salt, this is a non issue.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Probably the flouride, but RFK will sort that out.
| michaelteter wrote:
| Unfortunately on HN these days, it's impossible to tell if
| this is sarcasm or not.
| voidfunc wrote:
| At some point you realize almost all of these studies are
| pointless and you're talking about shaving or adding negligible
| amounts of time off your life while ignoring more serious risks
| like driving or inhaling smog and brake dust daily. It's not an
| excuse to go crazy and eat and drink total shit, but I've
| largely given up on modern medicine and nutrition having any
| fucking clue beyond calories in / calories out.
| hinkley wrote:
| Well at least it's not in vitro. Everything kills bacteria in a
| Petri dish.
|
| But it is topical. So it may do a treat for MRSA but not for
| resistant pneumonia.
| pshirshov wrote:
| There is a vaccine, which works against SA (including MRSA of
| course) as both a prevention and a cure:
| https://www.eapteka.ru/goods/id123804/ The old and mostly
| unknown legacy of the Soviet medicine. $50 per 20 doses.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The paper describe the effect at 1.4% saccharine in solution.
|
| The oral LD50 in mice is 17 g/kg.
| https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Saccharin#section=...
|
| _Maybe_ ok for topical application?
| arijo wrote:
| All sweeteners are considered harmful.
|
| Please watch the video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkyv1o8Xp_M
| mateus1 wrote:
| This guy advocates for 0 sugar intake, which seems like a very
| fringe opinion...
| profsummergig wrote:
| The gut biome thing.
|
| There have been murmurs on the conspiracy internet about how
| artificial sweeteners may have been responsible for making gut
| biomes less effective.
|
| This seems related. The gut biome refers to bacteria in the gut.
| Beijinger wrote:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweete...
| gyudin wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised. Living in US more and more of my
| immigrant friends discover severe food sensitivities that
| they've never experienced before.
| pshirshov wrote:
| > Saccharin breaks the walls of bacterial pathogens, causing them
| to distort and eventually burst, killing the bacteri
|
| Sugar, salt, kerosene and, for example, ethanol, do the same.
| What is special about saccharin?
| smt88 wrote:
| You can't put the other things you've listed on a wound in a
| hospital without some, uh... unpleasantness.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Sure thing you can put sugar or, for example, colloidal
| silver (an awesome option!).
| masfuerte wrote:
| I don't fancy kerosene much. Sugar works very well [1]. Salt
| and ethanol are very effective in mouthwashes, though ethanol
| is carcinogenic. I stick to the salt.
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180328-how-sugar-
| could-...
| smt88 wrote:
| Salt is painful and I believe the risk with sugar is that
| it can be metabolized by bacteria or fungi, so the remnants
| of it can make conditions better for microbes (although I
| haven't googled to confirm this)
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