Artificial sweeteners linked to glucose intolerance
17 September 2014 by Helen Thomson
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Aspartame, saccharin and sucralose made mice glucose intolerant – a risk for diabetes – probably by altering their gut flora. Is it happening in humans too?

ARTIFICIAL sweeteners can cause glucose intolerance in mice, and perhaps in humans, by altering gut bacteria, a series of experiments suggests. Although artificial sweeteners – among the world's most widely used food additives – are approved by most food regulation agencies as safe for humans, the researchers who led the work suggest that their use should be reassessed.

"The most shocking result is that the use of sweeteners aimed at preventing diabetes might actually be contributing to and possibly driving the epidemic that it aims to prevent," says Eran Elinav at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who co-supervised the work with his colleague Eran Segal.

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"We are by no means thinking that based on this study we could deduce direct recommendations for artificial-sweetener consumption," says Elinav. "We want to be very cautious about that. But the fact that we could induce glucose intolerance at a level that corresponds to a metabolic disease in five days should at the very least be a call for government agencies to reassess the unsupervised use of artificial sweeteners."

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More:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22...ue#.VBs4tldhDD4