🦠How Gut Bacteria Becomes Harmful

How Artificial Sweeteners Cause Healthy Gut Bacteria to Become Diseased

Your gut is home to trillions of bacteria that play a crucial role in digestion, immune function, and nutrient absorption.

These beneficial bacteria are essential for maintaining good health.

However, the balance of these bacteria can shift over time, and the foods we eat have a direct influence on this balance.

Maintaining a healthy gut is vital for overall well-being, but artificial sweeteners can disrupt this delicate system in several ways.

Here, I discuss how artificial sweeteners increase your risk of infection and affect glucose tolerance and the ability to absorb essential nutrients. In previous newsletters, I covered how artificial sweeteners impact brain health. If you haven’t caught up, check it out here.

Let’s first understand how artificial sweetener increases your risk of infection 🦠

1. Increasing the Bad Bacteria

Your gut has a protective lining and artificial sweeteners can damage and weaken this important gut lining. This makes it easier for harmful bacteria and toxins to enter your body.

Artificial sweeteners encourage bad bacteria. Instead of eliminating harmful bacteria like E. coli, they can actually help them form protective shields called biofilms, making them more resistant and harder to eliminate, potentially worsening your gut health.

Ultimately, artificial sweeteners disrupt the balance of bacteria in your gut by reducing the number of good bacteria and promoting the growth of harmful ones, leading to digestive issues and inflammation. 

Now, let’s explore how artificial sweeteners reduce your ability to absorb essential nutrients necessary for good health 🥕

2. Trouble Absorbing Nutrients

The good bacteria in your gut help break down the food you eat, but they react differently to artificial sweeteners than to real sugar. Over time, these bacteria become less effective at digesting natural/real sugars, which can disrupt your overall digestion.

When gut bacteria can’t effectively break down sugars, your body may struggle to absorb essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals from the food you eat — even if you maintain a healthy diet.

3. Impact on Blood Sugar

Those who are at risk of diabetes are often advised to use artificial sweeteners because they don’t contain real sugar and are thought not to affect blood sugar levels.

Interestingly, a study showed that people who were not diabetic and consumed sucralose and saccharin had higher blood glucose spikes during glucose tolerance tests compared to those who consumed glucose. This suggests that these sweeteners may contribute to glucose intolerance, where the body struggles to process sugar properly, increasing the risk of weight gain and diabetes.

Interestingly, no significant differences in blood sugar response were observed in participants who consumed aspartame, stevia, or glucose compared to those with no intervention, indicating that not all artificial sweeteners have the same effect on blood sugar.

🕰️ On Monday, I will post sweetener and sugar alternatives that should be useful to you, so stay tuned.

💌 If you found this newsletter helpful, please share it, and feel free to email me if you have any questions!

📲 Sign up for Haema to track your meal and see how it impacts your blood sugar. Haema automatically syncs with your CGM (Dexcom and Freestyle Libre) and exercise data so you have all your health data in one place to get a holistic view.

Thanks for Reading!

Jish 💜

Type 1 Diabetic & Co-Founder of Haema

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