Sugar free additives (at least aspartame and asesulfame K, jury is out on sucralose, stevia and the others) make my intestines ... not work according to empirical studies.
I drank exclusively sugar free drinks for a good 15 years and started to notice that my farts started smelling _really_ bad. Like "_I_ need to leave the room" bad. Thought it was gluten or wheat, it wasn't. Changed to sugary drinks for a few weeks -> boom, bowel/intestine issues gone.
Had a second bout of "issues" when Pepsi sneakily changed from pure sugar to sugar/artificial in their non-max lineup. Took me a while to actually read the label and see WTF happened. Now I'm a Coke drinker, not because I like it, but because it's the only one that's sweetened only with sugar.
Artificial sweeteners in soda (Aspartame and Asesulfame K) make me fart out stuff that smells so bad that it should be banned by the Geneva convention.
But weirdly it somehow depends on the ratio of the ingredients. Some brands I can handle, others I can never partake in (Pepsi MAX being the worst offender).
The artificial sweeteners are what create the gas and diarrhea. Sweeteners can affect people differently but more importantly it's the quantity that they eat.
If I have a couple sugar-free Lifesavers I'll fart a little bit more. If I say at the whole bag of sugar free gummy bears in 10 minutes well then I would be running to a toilet soon.
It's the surprise element. Most people don't know these things so they eat a bunch like normal then quickly realize their mistake.
Aspartame and asesulfame make my farts smell like literal death - have done so for over a decade, took me a long while to figure out the reason. _Something_ is going on with my gut bacteria and those two.
I could also easily down 1.5 litres of sugar free Pepsi MAX in an afternoon. On the other hand a can of sugar coke is more ... satiating? Can't drink EU-Pepsi at all, because even the sugar version has the two horsemen of the fartocalypse in it =(
My anecdata is that at one point Aspartame and/or Asesulfame K did something to my gut flora.
Now both or either one (can't say which) give me gas. And not funny gas but "this is a war crime" -gas.
Sugary drinks don't do this. Also this is how I discovered that Scandinavian Pepsi started replacing sugar partially with Aspartame. Took me a while to read the label and find out. I switched from Pepsi to Coke (still full sugar) and the issues went away.
Even though a substance is studied extensively, there might still be adverse effects that people don't attribute to it. I'm not afraid it would give me cancer but bioweapon levels of gas is something I can't live with. Sadly it's getting harder and harder to find drinks that don't have Aspartame in it...
I had many unpleasant experiences with zero calorie sodas, especially if I started to consume them regularly. Belching, farting, reflux etc. Those always went away when I stopped. (I do not drink sugary sodas at all.)
So it wasn't as surprising for me to learn that there are suspicions that artificial sweeteners may alter gut biome.
There isn't any consensus yet, but my N==1 seems to agree with the suspicion. I am generally fairly sensitive to gut biome changes, even a few weeks on a different probiotics might change e.g. my sensitivity to milk.
The whole war on sugar is baffling to me. After I had my first glass of soda in a decade, my impression is that artificial sweeteners are garbage. Poisonous, too. But this has been known for decades, hasn't it. It's cheap, though.
As for me, I am off to the toilet for my drink. It has served me well so far even though it has no taste or electrolytes
Well, there’s some evidence that artificial sweeteners contribute more to weight gain, metabolic disorder, and type II diabetes than sugar does (due to biological feedback loops), and is more harmful to the gut microbiome. Then there are all the other chemicals (phosphoric acid, iirc?) in the coke flavoring syrup that aren’t so great for you.
Intuitively, it would make sense that the introduction of such an artificial and alien chemical into the diet would have some kind of negative effect, for whatever that's worth. I say that as a fairly heavy user of sweeteners.
Your claim about artificial sweeteners not touched by digestion and metabolism is generally not true.
Aspartame is broken down in the digestive tract, for example, as is neotame. Glycyrrhizin is broken down in the gut and then metabolized in the liver. I would expect it's the same for sugar alcohols, they are metabolized by gut bacteria and can cause bloating because of that.
Unfortunately, the chemists merely tasted, not ingested. Otherwise they would have known that their newly found artificial sweeteners cause nasty bowel issues.
I think everyone started out assuming they had no other effects. Recently, though, evidence has shown up [0] that suggests that they have some unexpected effects on gut bacteria. I don't think anyone has figured out why.
Seems like everything has artificial sweeteners nowadays. It's a trend that I noticed only in the last couple of years. And not just fizzy drinks like Sprite or Pepsi - which have sugar and sweetener! - but breakfast cereals, yoghurts, ketchup-like sauces... all have "no added sugar" on the package, you dig a bit deeper and they are full of sweeteners.
Chewing gum and other "healthy sweet" products like that have used sweetener for years, and have always had a warning not to take too much, or it'll give you the shits. Clearly bad for your gut or you wouldn't be getting these side effects. Yet here we are, with sweeteners everywhere and getting more pervasive.
I just try to avoid sugar and sweeteners as much as possible. Seems like half the things I add in "My Fitness Pal" have a little orange warning about something :(
I drank exclusively sugar free drinks for a good 15 years and started to notice that my farts started smelling _really_ bad. Like "_I_ need to leave the room" bad. Thought it was gluten or wheat, it wasn't. Changed to sugary drinks for a few weeks -> boom, bowel/intestine issues gone.
Had a second bout of "issues" when Pepsi sneakily changed from pure sugar to sugar/artificial in their non-max lineup. Took me a while to actually read the label and see WTF happened. Now I'm a Coke drinker, not because I like it, but because it's the only one that's sweetened only with sugar.
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