Recap: The truth about artificial sweeteners | Eran Elinav & Tim Spector

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're exploring artificial sweetness. Back in July 1982, Coca Cola launched a groundbreaking new product, Diet Coke, a healthier alternative for those Coke fans looking to cut back on sugar and manage their weight. Sounds great, right? Well, maybe not. You see, Diet Coke and many other low sugar drinks rely on artificial sweeteners. And while they were once seen as a smart swap, emerging research is raising serious concerns about their long term effect on our health. Health. In this episode, I'm joined by professor Eran Elinav and professor Tim Spector to break down the latest science and explore how these sweeteners impact our gut microbiome. What is an artificial sweetener? Why do they exist? So, artificial sweeteners, which are currently, re termed non nutritive sweeteners, are a very diverse group of chemicals that, feature a very intense sweet taste. In other words, they are much better than natural sugar in engaging and inducing taste receptors, which lead to our brain interpreting their taste as as intensely sweet. So so there are hundreds of times, sweeter than than natural sugar. And these artificial compounds were developed and discovered, over a century ago as means of satisfying people's sweet tooth without, paying the caloric, price. So, I think the first of of these compounds was saccharin, which was, discovered over a 100 years ago, and and it was used, as a a in inexpensive and and intensely sweet substitute, to sugar. These, compounds have been extensively integrated, into human diet with the hope and belief that, we would, generate this pleasurable intenses we taste to many of our foods. So these, compounds can be, found both as an independent additives to, you know, coffee and so on and so forth. But also, if you were to go to your local supermarket and look at the ingredient links of many foods, you would find these compounds, integrated in many cases without explicitly, you know, telling the consumers that they're there. But it's it's actually very hard and very difficult to well, it was one of our biggest challenges to find individuals who are not exposed to these compounds in their daily lives. And there's a huge range of them on there. So, I mean, as well as saccharin, which is the early ones, which came, I think, from the petroleum industry. A lot of these come from, you know, basic organic chemistry rather than as foods originally, discovered by accident. Then you've got the aspartame, the the sucraloses, the ace k's, all the sugar alcohols, things like xylitol, also some newer ones, things like monk fruit, neotame. There's there's an increasing list of these that are often used in combination now even with sugar. So that's why it's very hard for, you know, people to work out what they're eating is because they're often …