This is a study done on cell cultures. It should NOT be used to influence behaviors regarding human health. The article linked makes a lot of leaps not supported by the study itself.
This sounds like a smart comment, but the main reason you shouldn't take in vitro studies as indicative of real medical outcomes is largely due to unknown bio availability when consuming realistic doses. However, this study shows that the concentration of erithritol is well above the concentration where they see negative effects in vitro when consuming a realistic dose.
In addition epidemiological studies have found associations between higher plasma erythritol and clotting/cardiovascular events. So, regular disclaimers about difficulty of establishing health science aside, I would disagree this should 'not influence behaviors'.
> However, this study shows that the concentration of erithritol is well above the concentration where they see negative effects in vitro when consuming a realistic dose.
Are you saying that when you eat a normal/largish amount of erithritol (say 1-10g), the concentration of erithritol in your brain is similar to what they tested on brain cells in vitro here?
Also, how can they make a link to stroke when testing in vitro?
>It should NOT be used to influence behaviors regarding human health.
It's not like erythritol is hard for a consumer to avoid. P(serious problems like brain cell damage) does not need to get very high for it to start to make sense to avoid it, and it seems to me that studies done on cell culture can raise P high enough.
The test setup ignores the digestive system. There are going to be a lot of substances you can pour on a culture of brain cells with negative affect that your body produces or happily consumes. That’s the point of the parent.
Add milk, an alcoholic beverage, or some lemon juice and those cells are unlikely to survive. Meanwhile the standard path of consumption handles the situation just fine before your brain is ever involved in metabolism.
It actually is. If you're shopping low carb/keto marketed stuff, they put it in almost everything. Even other sweeteners like stevia, monkfruit, allulose often are cut with majority erythritol. You have to really scour the packaging to make sure you're buying "stevia" and not a "stevia blend" etc. Erythritol sucks too. It gives a weird cooling sensation on your tongue like menthol, I have no idea why they mix it into everything.
> It's not like erythritol is hard for a consumer to avoid.
How many ingredients with negative effects on the order of erythritol are in my foods, cosmetic products, homecare products, food packaging, etc that I need to be aware of? Not how hard is it to avoid erythritol -- but how hard is it to avoid every substance that is at least similarly bad for me?
In vitro studies demonstrate potential mechanisms but cannot establish causality in humans due to differences in metabolism, bioavailability, and the blood-brain barrier's protective effects.
To the reader, I strongly urge not listening to some rando on the internet (in opposition to the scientists) who asks you to dismiss a study, because the risk-reward calculus here is strongly in favor of not taking the unnecessary risk of brain damage.
Drinking distilled water will also kill oneself, just slowly. This is because it is demineralized and it can become acidic. It also risks leeching and dissolving heavy metals from foods, risking their increased absorption.
Seeing as this is an in vitro study, they fall back on a specific human study (Witkowski et al., 2023) for many of the human effect claims. However the referenced study has a few issues:
- All study subjects had a "high prevalence of CVD [cardiovascular disease] and risk factor burden"
- Erythritol occurs naturally in the body and and this was not accounted for
- The study subjects were already suffering from cardiovascular disease and were likely to be consuming more artificial sweeteners than a general population, but this was not recognized or accounted for
- Erythritol's presence after a cardiovascular incident could be from consumption or from natural production but only baseline was measured despite data showing dramatic fluctuations after consumption
Another one of the studies cited for evidence of human claims (Khafagy et al., 2024) directly contradicts them. It stated said "we did not find supportive evidence from MR that erythritol increases cardiometabolic disease".
There are two more human studies referenced but I didn't read them.
The German Wikipedia article says it appears naturally in cheese, funghi, plums, strawberries and pistachios. So maybe the lab experiment might be a bit artifial, or the dose much higher than from normal consumption if the above?
The dose people use for sweetener can be 1,000x - 10,000x the amount you'd find in fruit. There's micro to milligrams of it in some foods, people eat anywhere between 3g to 20g+ if they're eating goods baked with it as a sugar replacement.
There is also the topic of erythritol-induced diarrhea in higher consumption.
Its almost like these days people are desperately grasping for anything that will deliver weight loss, apart from changing their longterm unhealthy fucking eating habits. US is a long term champion but it has slowly crept into most cultures, just not at that scale yet.
Food portion size, its composition and breaking some sweat regularly works wonders but nobody ain't got time or willpower for that.
In natural foods, there are other substances that balance out the harm, making it healthy overall. These other substances are absent when it's used as an additive.
No, I'm sorry but that's not correct. "Natural" is a meaningless health and wellness buzzword that handwaves away the details that each food comes with benefits and disadvantages. There are variable amounts of anti-nutrients almost every "natural" ingredient, some of which we process or cook to lessen them.
Indigenous people processed acorns to remove tanins.
Kidney beans (and many other legumes to variably lesser degree) naturally contain phytohaemagglutinins (PHA-E) which cause red blood cells to clump together. These can be reduces several orders of magnitude by repeated cooking, washing, and draining.
Men shouldn't eat too much soy or chia seeds. Small amounts of chia seeds are fine.
Most adults are lactose intolerant unless they have lactase persistence genes.
Spinach, pepper (the spice kind), rhubarb, almonds, and more contain oxalate that can lead to kidney stone formation. Excess vitamin C does also. Increasing citrate intake helps prevent calcium kidney stone formation, but doesn't help with oxalate kidney stones as much.
The list of antinutrients is long. Don't overdo eating one "natural" ingredient or another because that's the greatest risk of becoming a Chubbyemu video subject.
As you say I believe the correlation is reverse causality. It's much more likely that people who consume stuff with "artificial" sweetener are already at risk for stroke than the other way around.
If you don't have weight/cardio problems it is weird to consume "sugar-free" stuff and associated because they are almost always worse tasting than the real deal.
To have any importance they would need a big population sample and correct for already existing risks for stroke and I believe they would find that this stuff has very little impact, if any.
But as always, it doesn't cost much to limit consumption, so why not?
To the reader, I strongly and vehemently urge not listening to some rando on the internet (as opposed to the scientists) who asks you to dismiss a study, because the risk-reward calculus here is strongly in favor of not taking the unnecessary risk of brain damage. The rando will not be around to look after you after you get brain damage.
I can not speak to this study, just my own anecdotal experience. I consumed sugar free monsters erythritol for a long time and it now causes pain level 2 in my left temple and visual auras in my left eye if I consume more than two cans in a day its not the 142mg of caffeine before someone suggests it. There is a coconut water at the grocery store that has 20G of erythritol and that will quickly give me a powerful kaleidoscope visual aura that lasts for a couple hours. I can make it go away faster if I lay down in a cool dark room.
Your experience deserves a proper evaluation by a neurologist, including several tests/scans. You don't want to risk seizures down the road - they can cause significant damage and even kill. A proper course of memantine for up to three months probably also won't hurt.
Not dismissing your experience, in fact, quite the opposite:
I think you should talk to some doctors about this; I've never heard of anything like this before, and I know that when odd vision/eye-stuff is concerned, it can sometimes warrant a visit to a neurologist.
Evidence in vitro suggests enhanced platelet activity. Plasma levels of erythritol are sustained for >2d above thresholds associated with platelet hyper-reactivity after consumption of realistic doses.
I use artificial sweeteners, but prefer sucralose or anything else to erythritol. I actually don't understand why people still use it (often in 'health food' because it's seen as 'natural'), there are much safer options.
I found a Stevia product, White Stevia, in my local organic market. It has maltodextrin added, but that's it. The downside is it's not measure-for-measure with sugar (1/6 tsp vs 1 tsp sugar).
I could be off, my molar math is pretty rusty, but a back of the envelope stab seems like 6mM concentration would be _way_ below the 30g "serving" in a drink so assume their "equivalent of" is taking into account the concentrations estimated in the body after consumption or some such.
It's only present in miniscule amounts in fruit and other produce. As a sweetener it's 1000x to 10000x more concentrated, which puts it in a completely different context.
Using traditional sugar as a sweetener is well established as having negative effects, including inflammation. Many of the alternative sweeteners have a much lower glycemic index, so are thought to be healthier than ordinary sugar in that respect.
If you regularly consume ordinary sugar, you may be in the “not that healthy to begin with” category yourself.
Are you trying to justify erythritol on the basis of inflammation from sugar -- because you can't.
Stevia is a wholly suitable alternative, although its taste and dosing takes some getting used to. Good quality honey in moderation is also fine if the HbA1c stays optimal.
> FWIU, beta-cyclodextrin is already FDA approved, and injection of betacyclodextrin reversed arterio/atherosclerosis; possibly because our arteries are caked with sugar alcohol and beta-cyclodextrin absorbs alcohol
I have never taken beta cyclodextrin for any indication. I thought I would relay the study and that it's already approved for human use.
FWIU when the sugar industry maligned fat in the US in the TODO, food manufacturers replaced fat in "reduced fat" foods with fake sugar substitutes which each have harms, high fructose corn syrup, or molasses.
What percentage of cardiovascular "plaque" is sugar alcohol and thus apparently treatable with β or α cyclodextrin, in controls and patients with conditions like Arteriosclerosis and Atherosclerosis?
Readit News
Link to actual study: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...
In addition epidemiological studies have found associations between higher plasma erythritol and clotting/cardiovascular events. So, regular disclaimers about difficulty of establishing health science aside, I would disagree this should 'not influence behaviors'.
Are you saying that when you eat a normal/largish amount of erithritol (say 1-10g), the concentration of erithritol in your brain is similar to what they tested on brain cells in vitro here?
Also, how can they make a link to stroke when testing in vitro?
It's not like erythritol is hard for a consumer to avoid. P(serious problems like brain cell damage) does not need to get very high for it to start to make sense to avoid it, and it seems to me that studies done on cell culture can raise P high enough.
Add milk, an alcoholic beverage, or some lemon juice and those cells are unlikely to survive. Meanwhile the standard path of consumption handles the situation just fine before your brain is ever involved in metabolism.
How many ingredients with negative effects on the order of erythritol are in my foods, cosmetic products, homecare products, food packaging, etc that I need to be aware of? Not how hard is it to avoid erythritol -- but how hard is it to avoid every substance that is at least similarly bad for me?
If you poured distilled water on cells in culture they'd also all die.
- All study subjects had a "high prevalence of CVD [cardiovascular disease] and risk factor burden"
- Erythritol occurs naturally in the body and and this was not accounted for
- The study subjects were already suffering from cardiovascular disease and were likely to be consuming more artificial sweeteners than a general population, but this was not recognized or accounted for
- Erythritol's presence after a cardiovascular incident could be from consumption or from natural production but only baseline was measured despite data showing dramatic fluctuations after consumption
Another one of the studies cited for evidence of human claims (Khafagy et al., 2024) directly contradicts them. It stated said "we did not find supportive evidence from MR that erythritol increases cardiometabolic disease".
There are two more human studies referenced but I didn't read them.
The German Wikipedia article says it appears naturally in cheese, funghi, plums, strawberries and pistachios. So maybe the lab experiment might be a bit artifial, or the dose much higher than from normal consumption if the above?
I'm struggling to find a good source on this right now but I remember reading that it could be as high as 10% of all glucose is converted this way.
Its almost like these days people are desperately grasping for anything that will deliver weight loss, apart from changing their longterm unhealthy fucking eating habits. US is a long term champion but it has slowly crept into most cultures, just not at that scale yet.
Food portion size, its composition and breaking some sweat regularly works wonders but nobody ain't got time or willpower for that.
Dosage is still a thing.
Indigenous people processed acorns to remove tanins.
Kidney beans (and many other legumes to variably lesser degree) naturally contain phytohaemagglutinins (PHA-E) which cause red blood cells to clump together. These can be reduces several orders of magnitude by repeated cooking, washing, and draining.
Men shouldn't eat too much soy or chia seeds. Small amounts of chia seeds are fine.
Most adults are lactose intolerant unless they have lactase persistence genes.
Spinach, pepper (the spice kind), rhubarb, almonds, and more contain oxalate that can lead to kidney stone formation. Excess vitamin C does also. Increasing citrate intake helps prevent calcium kidney stone formation, but doesn't help with oxalate kidney stones as much.
The list of antinutrients is long. Don't overdo eating one "natural" ingredient or another because that's the greatest risk of becoming a Chubbyemu video subject.
* It does not show human harm, only cellular disruption.
* It uses an unnatural exposure method.
* It builds on epidemiological correlations that may be reverse causality.
* It does not account for systemic factors, metabolism, or adaptive responses.
As you say I believe the correlation is reverse causality. It's much more likely that people who consume stuff with "artificial" sweetener are already at risk for stroke than the other way around.
If you don't have weight/cardio problems it is weird to consume "sugar-free" stuff and associated because they are almost always worse tasting than the real deal.
To have any importance they would need a big population sample and correct for already existing risks for stroke and I believe they would find that this stuff has very little impact, if any.
But as always, it doesn't cost much to limit consumption, so why not?
I think you should talk to some doctors about this; I've never heard of anything like this before, and I know that when odd vision/eye-stuff is concerned, it can sometimes warrant a visit to a neurologist.
Evidence in vitro suggests enhanced platelet activity. Plasma levels of erythritol are sustained for >2d above thresholds associated with platelet hyper-reactivity after consumption of realistic doses.
I use artificial sweeteners, but prefer sucralose or anything else to erythritol. I actually don't understand why people still use it (often in 'health food' because it's seen as 'natural'), there are much safer options.
Since I have to watch out for it, I've noticed it's becoming more and more common as a sweetener.
https://www.nunaturals.com/products/stevia-white-stevia-powd...
Would the whole drink amount really all be given to those cells?
For example erythritol itself occurs naturally in some fruit and fermented foods, making it a "normal sweetener".
If you regularly consume ordinary sugar, you may be in the “not that healthy to begin with” category yourself.
Stevia is a wholly suitable alternative, although its taste and dosing takes some getting used to. Good quality honey in moderation is also fine if the HbA1c stays optimal.
https://www.samsclub.com/p/quest-protein-bar-variety-chocola...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-023-01504-6
Of course, a significant majority of Americans aren't all that healthy - I guess I'm not sure what your point is.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299867 :
>> "Cyclodextrin promotes atherosclerosis regression via macrophage reprogramming" (2016) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aad6100
>> "Powdered Booze Could Fix Your Clogged Arteries" (2016) https://www.popsci.com/compound-in-powdered-alcohol-can-also...
> FWIU, beta-cyclodextrin is already FDA approved, and injection of betacyclodextrin reversed arterio/atherosclerosis; possibly because our arteries are caked with sugar alcohol and beta-cyclodextrin absorbs alcohol
Have you been taking beta-cyclodextrin for a while? In what dose?
FWIU when the sugar industry maligned fat in the US in the TODO, food manufacturers replaced fat in "reduced fat" foods with fake sugar substitutes which each have harms, high fructose corn syrup, or molasses.
What percentage of cardiovascular "plaque" is sugar alcohol and thus apparently treatable with β or α cyclodextrin, in controls and patients with conditions like Arteriosclerosis and Atherosclerosis?