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Scientists Link Popular Sugar Substitute to Liver Disease (scitechdaily.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] 25 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    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!

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    As it turns out when you overload your liver your liver is overloaded.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    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.

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