[Diabetes] General Chat and Support Thread

Preset No.3 wrote: »

For some reason I have been seeing more ads about the bad things that Coke does to your system. Now being a type 2 diabetic, I would drink Diet Coke, which is another can of worms altogether.

ARTIFICIAL sweeteners can cause glucose intolerance in mice, and perhaps in humans, by altering gut bacteria, a series of experiments suggests. Although artificial sweeteners – among the world's most widely used food additives – are approved by most food regulation agencies as safe for humans, the researchers who led the work suggest that their use should be reassessed.


"The most shocking result is that the use of sweeteners aimed at preventing diabetes might actually be contributing to and possibly driving the epidemic that it aims to prevent," says Eran Elinav at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who co-supervised the work with his colleague Eran Segal.

But can the results in mice be extrapolated to humans?

To explore this, the team asked seven healthy people who don't normally consume sweeteners to eat the FDA's maximum daily allowance of saccharin. For a person weighing 68 kilograms, this would equate to three to four sachets of sweetener taken three times per day.

By day five, four of the seven people had a significant decrease in their glucose tolerance, while three saw no change. Sequencing showed that those who responded to the sweetener started out with different gut bacteria to those who didn't respond. What's more, the gut bacteria of the four responders changed significantly after consuming sweeteners, while the non-responders' barely changed.


To further show that bacterial changes were playing a role, the team took stools from two responders and two non-responders and transplanted them into sterile mice. Only the mice that received gut bacteria from responders became glucose intolerant (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature13793).
Segal says that the global rise in sweetener consumption – along with other major shifts in human nutrition – coincided with the dramatic increase in obesity and diabetes epidemics around the world. He also suggests that sweeteners may have directly contributed to the exact epidemic that they were created to fight.

Rucking_Fetard wrote: »

why is that not available for everyone?