From the actual study[0]
Human cerebral microvascular endothelial cells (hCMECs) were cultured and treated with 6 mM erythritol, equivalent to a typical amount of erythritol (30 g) in an artificially sweetened beverage, for 3 h.
Am I reading this right? They basically soaked brain cells in diet soda for three hours?
[0] https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00276.2025
Endothelial cells are not the same as neurons. They are the type of cell that form the inner lining on blood vessels (so in direct contact with flowing blood).
I understand that, but they still soaked them in a solution with the same concentration as diet soda.
I was expecting yet another aspartame-bashing article, but it’s an erythritol-bashing one this time.
Look, it’s really simple: all those sweeteners have been in widespread use for a long time. Wanna know if they’re harmful? Do some stats correlating release dates in several countries and occurrence of this-or-that disease and death records. If you can’t find a statistically-significant correlation, well… it doesn’t prove the stuff is harmless, but chances are it is.
That’s assuming there aren’t already a kajillion inconclusive studies on the particular molecule you’re interested in, as with aspartame.
Compare it to sugar while at it. It doesn’t need to be harmless, it needs to be less harmful than sugar.
And that’s a fairly low bar to cross.
Sugar is like water and air: it’s fine in reasonable quantities 🙂
As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison.
And the same goes for all sweeteners too. In fact, I know for a fact that consuming aspartame in large quantities is harmful, because I used to consume entirely too much of it every day by mistake, and I very much felt the effects when I quit.
I don’t need to do hours of graduate level health polling and statistics if I only eat what my great grandparents would have recognized as food. Rules of thumb aren’t perfect but they’re good enough.
I don’t mean to be argumentative but this is a logical fallacy called “appeal to tradition” where something is argued to be correct because it has been historically accepted.
For example, your great grandparents could have had a diet heavy in saturated fats (bacon, etc) and died prematurely from cardiovascular disease, albeit not before they had children. So just because they recognized it as food doesn’t mean it’s a healthy choice for people seeking a healthy, long life.
“…The researchers did not yet test this in people. They went straight to the cells that line your brain’s blood vessels…”
I don’t remember giving them consent.
Is this not your signature on a magazine subscription from 1998? Always read the fine print.
Regardless of the methodology used for this study, I’ve switched to pure stevia now. I hate that a lot of stevia products actually use erythritol and just list it in small font.
I’ve been swapping half of my sugar in my morning coffee with a few drops pure liquid monk fruit. No idea if that’s better or worse than erythritol.
I’m not sure either, but I figured if it comes naturally from a plant, it might be safer.
Agreed, but then again, so does arsenic…
Whatever it does, it makes me feel like shit, so I avoid it.
