"How Much Erythritol Sweetener Is Too Much?"
Erythritol is a sugar alcohol naturally found in small quantities
in certain fruits and vegetables, now produced in mass quantities
commercially for use as a sweetener
with about 70 percent as sweet as table sugar.
Previously I talked about its role in actively preventing tooth decay.
It’s reported to be “totally safe,” with almost no calories,
and, as a bonus, it’s less laxative.
That’s always a good selling point.
Erythritol has the highest digestive tolerance
of all the sugar alcohols, but how much is that really saying?
I’ve talked about the case report of the air stewardess
with puzzling diarrhea found to be not so puzzling
given how much sorbitol-containing sugar-free gum she was chewing.
Sorbitol has also been implicated in “Halloween diarrhea,”
where people eat one too many sugar-free candies.
Erythritol, however, is said to be well-tolerated
even up to 80 grams if it’s spread out throughout the day,
which is like 19 teaspoons, or the sugar equivalent
of what you’d find in a 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew.
In terms of a single dose, though, the average weight man
in the U.S. could get away
with 14 teaspoons of erythritol at a time,
and the average weight woman 15 teaspoons.
Children do not appear to be more sensitive on a per weight basis,
but basically they’re so much lighter,
the maximum dose would be more like
three or four teaspoons at a time,
since above that, you start seeing diarrhea
and/or severe gastrointestinal symptoms.
And while adults may get away with downing
like a quarter cup at a time,
that’s based on when they started having the runs.
If you don’t want to have any symptoms,
you’d want to stick to under about three tablespoons at a time,
since once you hit four, it can make you nauseated
and give you borborygmi,
a fancy medical term for rumbling in your tummy.
Erythritol is also purported to have anti-oxidant properties.
I did a video about the paper that first discovered it.
But that was just demonstrating it in a test tube.
Does it actually make a difference?
Erythritol appears to have endothelial protective effects,
meaning protecting the cells that line our arteries.
Under normal blood sugar conditions, little effect,
but stress them out in a petri dish with high blood sugars,
and erythritol protected human endothelial cells.
Under normal blood sugars, a few endothelial cells were dying off,
but under high blood sugars, cell death shoots up.
But add some erythritol at that same high blood sugar level,
and death comes back down.
Erythritol attenuates cell death induced by diabetic stressors.
The researchers conclude that erythritol
may have a therapeutically important protective effect
on endothelial cells, but you don’t know...,
until you put it to the test.
“Effects of erythritol on endothelial function
in patients with type 2 diabetes”, and...
erythritol consumption acutely improved
small vessel endothelial function,
and chronically reduced major artery stiffness.
The researchers conclude that the beneﬁcial effects
of erythritol may be clinically relevant
if conﬁrmed in a controlled study.
Wait, it wasn’t controlled?
No, so you don’t know if it would have just happened anyway.
So, validation of these ﬁndings will require
a randomized, placebo-controlled study,
which should be easy to do since there are lots of things
you could secretly swap in for the erythritol,
and no one would know.
It hasn’t been done yet,
but things were looking pretty good for erythritol, and then…
Erythritol is associated with body fat gain in young adults?
What? Erythritol is a predictive biomarker for metabolic dysfunction?
Significantly associated with getting diabetes?
Significantly associated with getting coronary heart disease?
What is going on? We will find out next.