Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing
theguardian.com

・

18 points

・

Tarsul

・

2 days ago

5 comments

bn-l ・ 2 days ago

I’m no expert but this sounds like bunk. Doesn’t the body maintain a pretty stable blood glucose level regardless?:

> “These artificial sweeteners do not provide old-fashioned sugar or glucose into your body that is needed to be broken down in your body for energy and normal brain function,” Dr. Segil says. Basically, your brain may not be getting the fuel it needs if your diet is heavy in artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols, he explains. In theory, that may lead to some people developing issues with memory and cognition at a faster rate than others, simply because the brain is struggling to function as well as it should.

Also does it bundle sugar alcohols with the non-nutritive sweeteners?

gentooflux ・ 2 days ago

So over an average span of 8 years, the people in their middle 50s who consumed the most artificial sweeteners aged an average of 1.6 years more than they should have, meaning 9.6 years? What makes that "62% faster"?

  • JohnFen ・ 2 days ago

    Yeah, this was either a terrible study, or terrible reporting on the study. Hard to tell without the actual paper. I'm inclined to write this off as nonsense as reported either way.

    > People who consumed the most sweeteners experienced declines in their thinking and memory skills 62% faster than those with the lowest intake, the researchers found.

    It's not possible to understand what that percentage is supposed to mean because we don't know what dose rates they're talking about. On the face of it, the percentage makes no sense at all, but if the study is real and of good quality then there's very likely some lost nuance that changes the meaning of the figure.

    This sort of thing, by the way, is why every scientist I've ever worked with really hates popular reporting of their studies. Nuance and detail are almost always lost, so they're rarely reported correctly and people end up thinking the results were something very different than what they actually were.

    Then "science" gets blamed for being silly, when in fact it's the reporting.