Trouble With Erythritol
8th March 2023
I wrote a few months ago about a surprising finding with some food sweeteners. Sucralose and saccharin (but not aspartame or stevia) seemed to bring on impaired glucose tolerance, which is not something that you would have expected from molecules with none of sugar’s metabolic and nutritional effects. That was certainly worth thinking about, but now there are more disturbing results to add to it.
This new paper reports that another widely used non-nutritional sweetener (erythritol) appears to be associated with cardiovascular problems. That’s quite a surprise, because erythritol itself has been considered very safe indeed. It’s been used for decades as a sweetener, and is approved for that use in over sixty countries. To the tongue, it’s about 60% as sweet as sucrose (table sugar), which makes it easier to substitute than some of the far-sweeter alternatives, which then need to be bulked up to keep recipes from being thrown off (and those fillers themselves often cause the recipes to be adjusted). But it has basically no caloric value for the human diet.
Yet another study that attempts to pretend that correlation implies causation. The key term here is ‘predictor’.
March 8th, 2023 at 15:52
Hey, a news item that actually is relevant to my personal life! I do low-carb diet and am an occasional user of Erythritol. I read the linked article and … well, I’m skeptical. I’m at a university, so I was able to download the cited study. I’m far from an expert, but I’ve read many similar studies and know a few things to look for. If you’re a rank amateur, don’t feel dejected if you don’t understand a word…such studies are written in a certain style and clarity is not a priority. Here are just a couple criticisms; some of the respondents at Science said the same:
The cohorts (test subjects) were VERY unhealthy. This is just a snapshot, but the average subject was well into his 60s. About 25% are diabetic. About 1/6 were smokers. About 3/4 had “coronary artery disease”; roughly half had prior heart attacks. I’m not even going to bother with the lipids or blood pressure numbers; in fact, if you research those, they are not big factors to predict CVD (cardiovascular disease.) In sum, these were a bunch of sick old folks.
I don’t see a control group. Nor was this a double blind test. That doesn’t make the study worthless; but it does mean there was no control group (non-Erythritol users) for drawing comparison. The closest, apparently, was dividing into Quartiles (by amt. of Erythritol in blood). The charts do seem to indicate that Q4 (heaviest users) have 3-4 times the “MACE” (CVD risk) as the Q1 (lowest users). But those are relative rates. The study provides no actual data (absolute occurrence) on any endpoints used.
Mind you, all the above is just one layman’s opinion from barely scanning a study he doesn’t fully understand. So yes, perhaps there are issues with Erythritol. Or perhaps it’s not much worse than any other sweetener. For comparison, look up the adverse health issues caused by common “sugar” (sucrose/corn syrup.) Absent better proof of risk, I plan to continue using these fake sweeteners.