Dr. Joe Schwarcz

How do we rationalize this?

I think one point here is that when someone eliminates sugar from their coffee and they use an artificial sweetener, they will be so proud of themselves that they will then eat that piece of cake that they wouldn't have eaten if they had put sugar into the coffee, and the piece of cake will have more calories than the sugar would have had.

And then we're also seeing some concerning features about the artificial sweeteners, mostly about what they may do to our microbiome.

And this is this collection of bacteria that live in our gut.

And artificial sweeteners can imbalance those gut bacteria.

And that has consequences that can range from digestive problems to even mental problems.

I'm not a big fan of artificial sweeteners.

And of course, I'm not a big fan of the overconsumption of sugar either.

I think we need to cut down on both.

They're not.

Unfortunately, most of them, whether we're looking at aspartame, we're looking at sucralose, which are the prime ones.

Both of those will unbalance our gut bacteria, so they have that common feature.

Asulfame potassium, which is another one, also falls into that category.

I don't think that I would put too much weight on all of the publicity about aspartame being a carcinogen.

I don't think that there is sufficient evidence for that.

But this business of upsetting the microbiome is somewhat concerning.

What about stevia?

Stevia comes from a plant source.

Not that that tells you anything about whether it's good or bad, because one of the biggest myths out there is that anything that comes from nature is good and anything synthetic is bad, and that is just not the case.

Stevia has good, solid research behind it.