Artificial sweeteners are in the news almost constantly.
If you believe the headlines, they are terrible blights on our health that are far worse than the sugar they replace.
This isn’t always supported by the evidence, but it’s something that we love to hear, and so it gets reported on almost weekly regardless of what the data actually shows.
The most recent furor over artificial sweeteners is a perfect example. The headlines have been claiming for months that artificial sweeteners speed up cognitive decline.
According to a recent study, there are six of these ‘dangerous chemicals’, including common ones like xylitol and aspartame, that may be causing our brains to rot more quickly.
The study has been covered by hundreds of media outlets ….
This is all made especially remarkable given that it doesn’t really show any issues from artificial sweeteners at all.
The study itself is a very simple piece of observational research.
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One big thing is that food frequency questionnaires don’t really measure intake of food. They measure what people THINK they eat, but we know that we are often unreliable historians.
Most of these questionnaires ask about the last 12 months of eating, and people rarely remember their food intake for that long with any degree of accuracy.
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As letters to the journal have noted, there are also serious questions about the biological plausibility of the claim.
Some of the sweeteners are natural substances, one is actually a very rare form of sugar, and all of them are very different molecules. It would be extremely unlikely for all of these different chemicals to have the same impact on the brain.
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There’s also the problem of reverse causality – that is, people who were already experiencing brain declines due to diseases like diabetes or heart disease may have been more likely to eat and drink artificial sweeteners at the start of the study.
This is an issue that’s hard to correct with the sort of analysis that we see in this paper.
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Despite decades of fearmongering when it comes to artificial sweeteners, the reality is that they are very well-tested and generally not harmful.
