The deadly irony of artificial sweeteners

On Tuesday, I shared new research showing that sugary beverages double the risk of heart disease death. I also warned that switching to diet soda wasn’t the solution — in fact, it’s a big part of the problem.

Today, I’d like to take a moment to talk about exactly why that is. And I’m hoping that the results of a recent lab study will be enough to convince anyone still sitting on the fence to stop using sugar substitutes immediately.

Researchers presented these findings at the 100^th annual meeting of the Endocrine Society this past spring. For their experiments, they collected stem cells from the fat samples of obese subjects. And then they exposed these cells to sucralose — a popular low-calorie sweetener — in a laboratory setting.

Specifically, the stem cells spent 12 days in an atmosphere that mimicked an obesogenic environment — the kind that you would find in a person already struggling with metabolic syndrome and prone to obesity.

And in that time, they found that exposure to doses of sucralose equivalent to what you’d get from consuming four cans of diet soda per day resulted in significant upticks in expression of genes related to fat production and inflammation. They also found an increase in metabolism-slowing free radical accumulation (which can ultimately damage your DNA).

What’s worse, this effect appeared to be dose dependent. Meaning, the more diet soda you chug, the more fattening — and dangerous — it is.

Armed with this new information, the team performed another experiment. They took biopsies of abdominal fat from 18 different subjects — four were a healthy weight, the rest were obese. All consumed low-calorie sweeteners on a regular basis.

Analysis showed that, among the healthy weight subjects, gene expression within the fat samples wasn’t noticeably different. But the fat samples of overweight or obese subjects told a different story… revealing increased sugar transport and over-expression of known fat-generating genes, when compared to samples from peers without a diet soda habit.

Let me translate this for you, without mincing words: Low-calorie sweeteners sabotage the health of the very consumers they’re supposedly designed to help — diabetics and obese dieters.

At a minimum, diet sodas fan the flames of disease. At worst, they’re sending unsuspecting dieters to an early grave. Do yourself a favor and drink water or unsweetened tea instead.

If you’d like to learn more drug-free strategies to prevent and reverse metabolic syndrome, type-II diabetes or prediabetes, check out my Metabolic Repair Protocol. For more information, or to enroll today, click here.

Source:

sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180318144829.htm