Peggy Johnson: What about stevia and erythritol? Because that's how I eat any
sweets. I eat them every day. Okay, so that's a great question and let me just
take a few minutes and talk about the non-nutritive sweeteners story
back thirty years ago. About the only thing that was available was saccharin.
There was a huge scare about saccharin causing cancer, specifically bladder
cancer, because it happened in mice. Even 30 years ago, there were those of us who
looked at that and said, "Hmm you really don't have a significant record of
increased risk of bladder cancer in humans with saccharin." And you go back and
you look at the mouse data, the lab mouse data, and they were
basically given the the mouse what an equivalent to up to the human would be
would be about a pickup truck full of saccharin every day. So we still
don't know the answer in terms of humans if we gave if we had any human that
actually took a pickup truck full of it. May cause, can't cause bladder cancer for that
human. I just I don't expect that that study's gonna be done anytime soon. But
let's go to another view of this. There's clearly evidence that non-nutritive
sweeteners do impact the gut biome. There's been reports on that a couple
of years ago, it was some research that came out of Israel, and the gut biome is
very very important. They've done studies which demonstrate, look, if you if you
transfer the gut biome of someone that has insulin resistance or diabetes to
lab animals and even to other humans, it's been shown you will greatly
increase that recipient's risk of developing insulin resistance and/or
diabetes. So there is something to the gut biome and insulin resistance or
diabetes as well as there is too many other health determinants.
Now, one other side to this non-nutritive sweeteners saccharin was 30 years ago
now, you've got a ton of things. Just an update, I will tell you that there's been
significant research indicating challenges with all of the
non-nutritive sweeteners that I'm aware of, at least in terms of gut biome issues.
That's obviously not as hard an outcome as full-blown cancer, but you
still do see that you haven't seen them or at least I
haven't seen them in terms of the science, any significant evidence that
you get that from stevia. So here's my personal read on it.
I do use stevia, and I'm not concerned at all about stevia. I'm more concerned
about any of the others - the yellow packets, the pink packets
which are saccharin. The several of the others now things like monk fruit
actually have sugar in them. Erythritol is actually a pretty good one. It's
expensive, and for that reason, you don't see it used a lot. A
couple of other points about the non-nutritive sweeteners. I've been a
non-nutritive sweeteners addict for a major part of my life. I've gotten sick
of it. One of the things I've started doing is putting Gymnema in my
morning coffee. I've got videos on what else I put in my morning coffee.
Gymnema is an old... it's an ancient Ayurvedic medicine known
as the "sugar killer." And what it actually does is it cuts the sugar taste
receptors in the back of your tongue and palate. You can tell it by drinking or
putting some Gymnema in your mouth, then you go to ingest something sweet. Whether
it's a non-nutritive sweeteners or sugar, and it just doesn't taste the same out
of my whole life. I've tried multiple times to decrease non-nutritive
sweeteners addiction. I'm making significant progress now with good
old-fashioned, three-thousand-year-old Gymnema (or maybe it's a thousand years
old). But it's a very old intervention. Let me just say one last thing about
non-nutritive sweeteners before we move on. You'll see a lot of research about
out this. Oh, you gained weight with non-nutritive sweeteners, you get
diabetes with non-nutritive sweeteners, etc., etc. Those are environmental studies,
meaning you look at people that are using non-nutritive sweeteners, and then
you look to see how many people in each population (users and non-users) have
diabetes or obesity. You can do it the other way, and look at
people that have diabetes or obesity versus controls, and then look at
non-nutritive sweeteners use. Clearly guess what you're gonna see. You're gonna
see non-nutritive sweeteners use linked with people that have diabetes or
insulin because they don't want to take sugar and with people that are obese
because they're trying to cut back on their calorie intake. Let's go back so
you're always going to see that in the science when you do say that on a
specific study. Look for that bias because that is a study bias that really
doesn't mean anything in terms of the non-nutritive sweeteners themselves.
Final point on non-nutritive sweeteners. Now move on. Look at the diabetic
population. Look at Richard K. Bernstein. He's the godfather of diabetic self-care.
He still uses non-nutritive sweeteners. A lot recommends them despite having
full-blown, very brittle diabetes in his 30s and using non-nutritive sweeteners
up through his 80s. He did not have a problem. And all he did all his life was
manage other diabetics and did not see problems with non-nutritive sweeteners.
So yes, there's some soft signals that non-nutritive sweeteners are a problem.
They're very soft, and even those soft signal, they had to do with again gut
biome kind of stuff. They don't have to do with diabetes. The signals up in their
search regarding diabetes and obesity. Again, very unclear, not something I would
worry about at all because of the bias issue. Overall, it can be good to be
taking a chemical. And so I'm trying to I continue to try to work my own
non-nutritive sweeteners addiction. Of any of the non-nutritive sweeteners,
stevia and erythritol by far the best.
This is Ford Brewer. I started off my career as an ER doc. And that can be frustrating
because most of the things bringing patients into the ER can and should be
prevented, like heart attack and stroke. So I went to Johns Hopkins for training
in prevention, did well, ended up running the program. Trained dozens of docs
there. And they've trained hundreds and even over a thousand doctors since
then in preventing disease. What's even more important is I've helped thousands
of patients prevent heart attack and stroke rather than waiting for the
devastation and hoping for a cure.