No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. -Or Dessert:
In the war on Fat, science has spent decades on an antidote to one main offender.
-Sugar.
Because it’s not fat that makes you fat, it’s all the stuff that ruins your blood-sugar & insulin.
And one thing all phony-sugars had in-common, is that they were a bit iffy on what exactly their compounds did once inside your body.
Now we can add a possible link to stroke & dementia to their resume, but previous research may explain why…
But First, An Exercise-Nutritionist’s Outlook & The Big Bomb:
Sugar might be bad. In quantity, really bad.
But if you have so little room in your exercise & nutrition plan that you can’t afford a few teaspoons of sugar and have to resort to artificial sweeteners,
-You’ve got much bigger problems.
And now, perhaps the biggest bomb of the study that gives us our main story:
No connection was found between Stroke or Dementia frequencies and the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages.
-BOOM!
No Link Between Regular Sodas & Dementia Or Stroke:
Let’s restate it. -Even though this study can only show Correlation & not really confirm Causation,
No connection was found between Stroke or Dementia frequencies and the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages.
-Only artificially-sweetened beverages…
So How Much Bigger Is The Risk?:
And in the two target groups of almost 3,000 people over 45 and almost 1,500 over 60,
::drumroll please:
Subjects in the target groups were each about 3x More Likely to have a stroke or get dementia if they drank 1 diet soda per day.
Which, combined with the previous observation on sugar, is weird, because many studies have show adverse-effects of sugary drink intake like diabetes, & cardiovascular problems.
Dr. Ralph Sacco On Why:
So, then, what the actual hell?
Why do sugar-drinkers get the diabetic-chubbies & cardios,
while the seemingly-TINY dose of what was allegedly-proven safe-for-human-consumption in test-after-test is correlated with an increase of different & weirder problems?
Well 1 doctor Ralph Sacco, who wrote an editorial paper on the study has a pretty good hypothesis:
Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.
-Both of which, he cites are associated with increase incidence of Stroke & Dementia.
Kicker #2, Or The Missing-Link:
Those sweeteners might be absolutely safe-for-human-consumption,
-If you consider ONLY their effects on body+blood-chemistry, and nothing else.
Because, ::2nd drumroll please:: back a few years ago,
Dr. Eran Elinav’s team at the Weizmann Institute of Science found that artificial sweeteners don’t work,
And they end up raising your blood-sugar anyway.
How?…
They change the microbes in your gut.
-BOOM!
Double-Checking, Downstream-Effects & Recovery-Time:
By double-checking the gut-bugs, Eran’s team verified that the makeup was changed, and this affected all kinds of stuff,
Right out to even your blood-sugar levels; unusually-so.
Furthermore, it took Four Whole Weeks after the artificial-sweeteners stopped for the test-subjects’ metabolism to return to normal.
Probiotics, The New Daily Vitamin:
Pair that with the recent Hygiene-Hypothesis-like advice that Probiotics Should Be Taken Like Daily Vitamins,
And you could see why scientific follow-up comments to Eran’s study from other doctors like Cathryn Nagler even suggested probiotic-interventions to fix microbe-problems.
And these cover issues that overweight people might not even know they have.
Different Tests, But Weizmann Institute Of Science FTW, Regardless!:
So, Eran did not test for Stroke or Dementia.
But given the immense effects he did find, there might be a very strong suggestion that tested-as-safe sweeteners may be wreaking havoc in very unanticipated-ways,
And that there are other parts of our health that are MUCH more important than anyone ever thought before!
Check out all the details at the Links:
Photo Credits: “Beads, Fake Pearl”, by Ewa Kubiak
Links:
• Source: BU-Med
• via: CNN
• More Coverage:
• HT-Artificial Sweeteners Wreak Havoc On Gut Microbes
• Stroke-Editorial, Sugar-Sweetened and Artificially Sweetened Beverages in Relation to Stroke and Dementia, Are Soft Drinks Hard on the Brain?
• Source Study: Stroke-Sugar and Artificially Sweetened Beverages and the Risks of Incident Stroke and Dementia, A Prospective Cohort Study
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