Artificial Sweeteners, Obesity, and Diabetes

Last week, you may have seen headlines that said something like “Artificial Sweeteners May Cause Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes!” Just about every news organization picked up a press release from the Experimental Biology meeting. In the press release, researchers gave some of the results of a paper that was presented at a scientific session, including comments by the lead author, Dr. Brian R. Hoffman.

The purpose for doing the study, he said, was because of the epidemic of obesity and diabetes in the U.S. While there’s little question that excessive sugar intake, combined with excess calories over years, does contribute to obesity and type 2 diabetes, no one has really examined the role artificial sweeteners may play.

In these studies, he and his research team examined the effect of high levels of sugars, aspartame, and acesulfame potassium on epithelial cells taken from rodents in a test-tube study. Then using another group of rodents, they overfed them sugars and the same artificial sweeteners for three weeks. The objective was to see what changes occurred in proteins and metabolites that were produced in cardiovascular epithelial cells in the test-tube study and the blood of the rodents.

They found that there were modifications in proteins under both conditions, which may have led to changes in the products they produced. But is this meaningful research or not? I’ll tell you what I liked about the study in Thursday’s memo.

What are you prepared to do today?