Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

And in animal models, we know that can lead towards metabolic syndrome as well.

So there's components of processed food that are, when studied in isolation, known to have a direct negative impact on gut biology and the microbiota.

Very little.

A lot of those have a lot more bang for the buck.

They're incredibly sweet, so it takes a really small amount for them to trigger a huge amount of sweetness.

And so it's depending upon the mechanism of action by which these sweeteners that are not sugar are impacting our biology, it may be that those are actually less negative or more healthy than the ones that are artificial, just because it requires less of them in the food for us to perceive that sweet taste.

Historically, there are, I think, traditional populations that use these, for instance, to sweeten

sweetened different foods, that our bodies just kind of know how to deal with those compounds better than the ones that are synthetic.

But I think the studies still need to be done.

Yeah, you know, I do.

I avoid them, but I'm not, you know, I think that just doing things in moderation makes it a lot easier and doing things slowly makes it a lot easier.

And so there are very few rules that I have that are hard and fast.

I'm a pretty flexible eater.

I don't believe that having an artificial, you know, having a Diet Coke will, you know, somehow cascade into some terrible disease or something like that.

Before I dive into that study, let me take a step back because I think the reason that we did this study goes back to this kind of epiphany that we had while studying the gut microbiome.

Because I think when we started studying it at Stanford, we were thinking about it as this kind of newly appreciated aspect of our biology, almost like

finding an organ that we didn't know was there and starting to think about like all the drug targets that were there.

Can we go in with small molecule drugs and think of ways to manipulate this community to ameliorate disease?

And this is largely the mindset of Western medicine and largely born out of the era of infectious disease

You wait for an infection to start a bacterial infection, you treat with antibiotics, and that's the way medicine is practiced.