PieFedScientists Link Popular Sugar Substitute to Liver Disease
cyrano
scitechdaily.com/scientists-link-popular-sugar-…
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39956162
What I don’t get is why it took them decades to figure this out. Why have they been giving us sugar substitutes without understanding what they have been doing to us? Why were these approved for use in the first place?
16 Comments
Comments from other communities
It’s sorbitol.
The real mvp right here, fuck headlines like this
Capt. WolfBut if they just put it in the title, people won’t click and get bombarded with ads! Think of the big corporations!
Punk_faceBut…isn’t sorbitol a laxative??
TheLowestStoneall the -tols are laxatives, you heard ethyrthiol, i think its one of the potent ones that cause laxative effects the most. i heard tons of people were getting cramps or diarrhea for people who sensitive. some people are mildly affected by it, and some has no effect.
otterSo, that includes Fuckitol®, too? That makes sense.
DupaCyckiI’ve never even seen this in any food. Think I’ll be okay.
It’s typically used in items where you would only be consuming small amounts at once. Like sugar free gum and mints.
The article calls it “common”, but I’ve only seen it in a single brand of low-carb ice cream. I’ve actively sought low-carb options for over a decade. It’s even less common than xylitol.
medgremlinCopied from another posting of this article:
The headline (and the article for that matter) are very sensationalist and I don’t think they’ve presented this in a balanced way. They are discussing how sorbitol behaves in zebrafish with limited data presented on human biochemistry, and they discuss it in a vacuum without quantifying the amount of sorbitol it takes to cause a problem. Yes, any substance in excess can be harmful, but the amount of sorbitol in food compared to the amount of high fructose corn syrup makes it the substantially lesser evil. The artificial sweeteners are vastly more potent than actual sugar, so you don’t need very much of it to get the same amount of sweetness. High fructose corn syrup is used in massive amounts in food and is much worse for you on the scale that either substance would be consumed.
The scientific paper grift chain: get private funding from a company to publish a paper, use wild methodology, have the shit denounced and condemned by mainstream academia but not before every fucking news outlet in the world puts out a headline “BREAKING: SCIENTIFIC PAPER LINKS EATING SALAD TO BRAIN-EXPLODING DISEASE”
Never mind that to get this evidence they had to inject a marmot with enough salad dressing directly into its skull to make it explode thousand-island grey matter across its cage.
There’s a whole cycle of perverse incentives with University Press.
The underlying research is necessary and valuable but the marketing arm of universities blow everything out of proportion.
VeedemSorbitol-degrading Aeromonas bacterial strains convert the sugar alcohol into a harmless bacterial byproduct.
“However, if you don’t have the right bacteria, that’s when it becomes problematic. Because in those conditions, sorbitol doesn’t get degraded and as a result, it is passed on to the liver,” he said.
Pretty big caveat but the sensationalist headline is all people will see.
The article doesn’t read as very concerning. Too much of anything usually means bad. Under the right conditions anything can be bad. Figuring out what can be bad and when it can be bad can often take decades. Don’t stress too much on trying to optomize out anything that can do you harm in a diet. You’d have nothing left to eat and even the greatest collective of biologist getting together to make the greatest nutritional shake meal replacement would probably miss something that causes issues decades down the line or people drink too much and overdose
Phew! Thank God I’m not a zebra fish, otherwise I’d need to seriously reconsider my diet high on sorbitol.
… In fish.
Comments like this are ignorant to evolution. Zebrafish are an extremely powerful model for drug development and toxicology.
You are obviously correct.
Nonetheless, the headline doesn’t even hint at the YEARS of research required before this becomes something people should worry about.
What? I’m saying most research translates to humans and therefore people should cut back on sorbitol immediately or risk liver damage. Especially since people have very poor diets and do not maintain healthy gut flora. Are you seriously taking the stance that we should ignore this study and consume sorbitol? You first.
Maybe
Half baked (well done, but incomplete) research has said:
-Eggs are dangerous to eat
-Saccharine causes bladder cancer
-Smoking is good for colds
-The way to lose weight is to eat a low fat high carb diet.
Maybe not
Part of science is recognizing how strong your data are and not generating hysteria after every research paper.
What REALLY sucks is that we can no longer rely on the CDC and NIH to make recommendations.
So you are free to cut sorbitol out of your diet and it may turn out to be a good choice. If that change makes you and others obviously healthier, I am sure this research will be repeated and expanded and soon we will all look back and remember having had your opinion.
Edited formatting for readability
kaduZebrafish are an extremely powerful model for drug development and toxicology.
Sure. But there’s also a reason we don’t do in silico molecular dynamics, test toxicology on zebrafish, and boom done drug is on the market. Even extremely close organisms, with LCAs much earlier than the zebrafish, can have wildly different reactions to potential drugs and dietary elements.
There are things you can feed a chimp but not a human.
Not at all, I’m just aware that this may not have any relevance to people, and right now it’s little more than click bait fodder.
Do you think scientists start doing qualitative testing on humans first???
No, but I do expect people to assume this is based on humans which it isnt. If this research eventually gets there then we can see what it says, but for now it’s just another click bait article.
Tbh I am betting that it’s gonna come out that they’ve known about the health risks all along, but they tried to ignore/cover it up for profit reasons.
TrackinDaKrakenGive up sugar. Try it, and tell me it isn’t addictive.
Give up all sweeteners, because keeping them just makes you crave more, making it much harder.
I gave up sugar, and most fruits except berries. It made staying at my ideal weight MUCH easier. I really don’t need to think about it, I weigh myself every few weeks, and I’m always at my ideal weight. Exercise is the other part of the equation, I think we need to do both.
gustofwindI’m not sure why people expected all these sugar substitutes to be harmless
The entire notion of sugar substitution in the first place should be such an insane concept to everyone but somehow we’ve instead created a diet soda and junk food entitlement
LumidaubHonest question: what about this makes it obviously “insane”?
Ingesting chemicals to mimic sugar so you can have sweet things with no caloric consequences doesn’t seem insane to you?
dreadbeefi drink chemical called water. i add a bunch of chemicals clumped up in bean form, then roast those beans, and grind them up sometimes and call it coffee. I sprinkle in a chemical, sucrose, we call sugar. It’s all chemicals. I love chemicals. You love chemicals. We are all chemicals. You know why? Because you are made of dna. Guess what DNA is made of? That’s right, chemicals baby. DNA needs more chemicals to make more copies of itself. Without more chemicals, it would have to break the laws of thermodynamics to replicate itself. More chemicals are needed.
every time you think “they’re feeding us chemicals” as opposed to what? use synthetic or naturally occurring as a distinction or something. I am partial to lab juice.
Sugar is also a chemical. You simply can’t just say because “chemical” because that doesn’t make any sense. Sugar is actually 2 chemicals, so by that logic a sugar replacement that is only 1 chemical, should statistically be half as risky, based on the “chemical” logic, and by that logic make a lot of sense to use instead.
paraphrandJust to be a bit more charitable to their point, what word should they use instead of chemical when, broadly speaking about such things?
I’m aware of the fact that sorbitol might be a bad example. Replace it with aspartame. What word should they use to avoid getting told sugar is a chemical?
I’m not looking to argue, I just find the “everything is a chemical” rhetoric to be a bit obnoxious. And I think both sides could be making their points in a less adversarial way.
Maybe synthetic, since it a synthesized chemical rather than a refined.
But honestly that’s not really better, because synthesized is not inherently bad either.
I think what he meant was that these sugar substitutes are not natural to have in the amount possible with industrialized food.
But then again, the exact same thing goes for sugar.
There is no obvious argument IMO why sorbitol or any other alternative sweetener would be harmful.
And it is still far from certain that even if sorbitol can cause liver disease, that it is MORE harmful than sugar, that we know can cause a long range of diseases like diabetes and heart attacks.
Nothing is safe if you take high enough volumes of it. If you drink 5 liters of water quickly, it can cause brain swelling, and you can die from that too. And water is probably the least harmful substance you can take.
My conclusion is that the “point” is simply wrong, even when being as charitable as you can possibly be.
One thing to add, synthetic/artificial only describes some of the sugar alternatives. Others, such as stevia and erithritol, are perfectly natural. Doesn’t make them any safer (or more dangerous), as you noted.
such things
What things? There is no sub-group of chemicals whose sheer presence automatically makes a food harmful. The replacement is a different argument.
Y’all are being difficult and pedantic when you could rise above that. Especially given my specific question.
And I wasn’t asking you.
No. This may be obvious to you because you have knowledge that I lack.
Seems pretty ridiculous on face. Everyone is comfortable acknowledging how evil food and chemical companies are, and that is not new info
This is the equivalent of believing tobacco companies about cigarettes and then being super surprised down the line that they either lied or didn’t do enough research
You’re not explaining what is obvious about this.
Ingesting chemicals created by known bad actors in the food and chemical industry for the purpose of having those same bad actors sell you unlimited addictive sweets…
I mean come on
Injecting chemicals just so you can have sweet things power your muscle performance without buildup of acetone doesn’t seem insane to you?
Sugar is a chemical, you dumb fuck.
Injecting chemicals for increased muscle performance DOES seem insane to me
Try again
Is your objection to substitutions? Because that’s a very arbitrary line. Why is it that we call sorbitol a sugar substitute instead of calling sugar a sorbitol substitute? Grind up some plums to make juice, remove the sorbitol, add some sucrose in its place. Doesn’t sound all that different.
SamskaraThey have been used for decades without issue.
It takes decades to do the research or develop the issues
Genotoxicity of aspartame
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4235942/
Cancer risk of Erythritol
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/07/250718035156.htm
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/sugar-substitutes-new-cardiovascular-concerns
Oh who fucking cares? Everything we eat and breath is poison now. There is no saving anyone anymore.
MinnesotaGoddamExcuse me but I’m a better cook than that. Delicious poison is on the menu
They are strongly implying that this may also apply to other sugar alcohols like erythritol, xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, and lactitol.
Pretty click-baity. They found out sorbitol was one step from fructose, which the researchers are actually studying
The headline (and the article for that matter) are very sensationalist and I don’t think they’ve presented this in a balanced way. They are discussing how sorbitol behaves in zebrafish with limited data presented on human biochemistry, and they discuss it in a vacuum without quantifying the amount of sorbitol it takes to cause a problem. Yes, any substance in excess can be harmful, but the amount of sorbitol in food compared to the amount of high fructose corn syrup makes it the substantially lesser evil. The artificial sweeteners are vastly more potent than actual sugar, so you don’t need very much of it to get the same amount of sweetness. High fructose corn syrup is used in massive amounts in food and is much worse for you on the scale that either substance would be consumed.
This is the correct comment. People are very quick to demonize food and food manufacturers, and I’m not saying they aren’t making money on stuff that could be bad for us, but my understanding is that a lot of food additives that people worry about have been proven safe at reasonable consumption levels.
We are not zebrafish! Usually, anyway. And no dose info? Suspect.
Water will kill you if you drink too much of it. Everything in moderation!
Ah, yes! Food!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkphooryVyQ
It’s a hard watch so click at your own peril.
As it turns out when you overload your liver your liver is overloaded.
It’s quite hard to actually overload your liver with the artificial sweeteners unless you are drinking literal gallons of zero sugar pop a day or eating nothing besides artificially sweetened foods. The stuff is used in such tiny concentrations that someone would have to deliberately seek out overdosing on this stuff to get the same effects as the experimental animals are getting (because the experimental animals are being fed pure sorbitol in doses that no human could reasonably consume.)
That’s the problem with articles like this is that they don’t emphasize that they are only seeing this in animal models and they don’t disclose just how much of the stuff they had to give to the animal for the negative effects to occur. It’s also a bad study because it doesn’t account for the differences in the physiology and biochemistry between humans and zebrafish, nor does it account for the confounding factors in humans. You know who drinks and eats a lot of artificially sweetened things? People with diabetes and people who are trying to lose weight. These are people that are likely to already have fatty liver disease and the sorbitol didn’t really have much to do with it.
Well that’s how it works with just about everything in high-tech capitalism. Enterprise & profits first, downstream and knock-on effects examined later. Just look at plastics, nicotine, pesticides, etc etc.
I also tend to think that sorbitol and other replacements aren’t necessarily terrible in themselves, but look at the way they’re used– a typical diet drink / food item doesn’t attempt to lower overall sweetness levels, it attempts to replace almost 100% of the sweetness with the artificial product, killing much of the point of doing so.
The good news is that consumers can be trained and untrained over time to crave excess sugars, salt, fat, fried food, etc. So you can reprogram your tastes over time, and get used to vastly lower quantities of unhealthy substances. For example, I used to drink and get normalised upon store-bought iced teas, which contain drastic amounts of sucrose / corn syrup. I just make it myself now, using a single packet of sucralose and a single sugar cube (15 kcals) in about 28fl oz brewed tea (Gatorade bottle). It took time, but it tastes perfectly sweet now, to me.
Well, sorbitol makes you shit like the devil’s own firehose, so if anyone thought it was totally fine they were probably not paying attention.
After a certain age you may opt hor whetever moves it through ya
Naturally occurring sorbitol in prunes is what makes them a good laxative. And honestly, the extreme diarrhea from sorbitol isn’t related to what this article is saying is a potential health problem.
But the amount of sorbitol needed to cause liver strain as described in the article is going to be more than the amount needed to cause diarrhea, so it seems like a moot point.
Also you might need to be a fish
Yeah this doesn’t sound like such a bad thing TBH
A decades long double blind controlled study is FAR beyond the GRAS standard that requiring it would stifle not only commerce but also science in general.
That’s why sometimes we don’t see bad effects in food until decades later.
But Stevia is still save?