We’ve known for a while that consuming excessive amounts of sugar can be dangerous to our overall health. Emerging scientific evidence suggests that many popular sugar-free alternatives may not be much safer than sugar.
According to research recently published in the journal JCI Insight, consuming saccharin, stevia, and Ace K - even within FDA-approved limits - can affect the body, and, notably, brain areas linked to memory.
The findings of the study are unsettling, as they suggest that adolescents who consume saccharin, stevia, and Ace K exhibit memory impairments later on in their lives. The same sweeteners also harm the metabolism, which could contribute to diabetes and other metabolic issues.
The study also seems to indicate that these low-calorie sweeteners desensitize one to sugar, so you need to eat more sugar when it’s readily accessible.
Is Regular Sugar Better, Then? Unfortunately, no. Similar studies were conducted on sugar intake in the early years, and they too reveal identical memory impairments.
It needs to be noted, however, that both studies mentioned here were conducted on animal models, i.e. rats. This comes with its own limitations, but the researchers tried their best to make this study as applicable to humans as possible. As Prof. Lindsey Schier pointed out to Science Daily:
“Research using rodent models and low-calorie sweeteners has typically involved consumption levels that far exceed the FDA ‘acceptable daily intake’ (ADI) levels and used only a single sweetener. To design our research to be more applicable to humans, we kept consumption levels within the ADI and used multiple low-calorie sweeteners to determine if effects were specific to a given sweetener or general across sweeteners.”
At this point, you may start wondering - how do you test memory in rats anyway? Don’t worry, no one asked rats to recite poems. Instead, the researchers tested their object identification and spatial recognition - two tasks in which rats excel.
At the beginning of the experiment, rats were given water sweetened with saccharin, stevia, Ace K, or nothing at all in addition to food. A month later, the researchers tested the rats’ memory. One of these memory tests required the rats to remember a known object, and another one involved finding their way out of a maze.
As expected, all the rats that consumed sweetened water performed much worse on both tasks. Moreover, they also had fewer receptors capable of detecting sweetness on their tongues, and the way the intestines metabolized glucose was different too. Last but not least, the specific regions of the brain responsible for memory and reward behavior were affected.
Related Article: These Sugar Substitutes Are Harmful To Your Health!
That being said, all of these sweeteners have been deemed safe by the FDA. While the current study doesn’t give blanket advice to cut out these sweeteners from the diet, it provides much-needed information to consumers and medical professionals, and hopefully will lead to better health decisions.
To wrap up on a bright note, let’s also add the next step for the research team is to develop ways to reverse the adverse effects of sweetener consumption.
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