Thanks, Janet. I'm following this closely, as the use of AS is everywhere. Even in restaurants now where a desire to make a salad dressing slightly sweet results in the addition of some aspartame for the desired flavor effect. I'm a canary in a coal mine with aspartame, as I get an ocular migraine when consuming any amount. At a restaurant recently, I ordered a house salad with oregano vinaigrette dressing and upon arriving home, my migraine started. While it's encouraging to see the negative news about the effects of sugar, AS have yet to undergo the scrutiny required to determine what they are really doing to our health.

As for the Guardian article, Dr. Ines Cebola's quote is quite classic:



What a cop out!!! Nice to know we're in such good and steady hands with these medical professionals . . . . This is just another compelling reason for people to take nutrition matters into their own hands.

I wouldn't do this either. But I also wouldn't point a finger at carbohydrate or even sugar as isolated elements of risk. But it doesn't matter. The question isn't whether sugar or carbohydrate is solely to blame--but whether removing sugar or carbohydrate from the diet is enough of a dietary change to remove the risk. Showing that fat, or carbohydrate, or artificial sweeteners are safe for some population--all that shows is that there are conditions where these things are safe. Removing these things and getting therapeutic results--shows that something about the starting conditions was such that these things did contribute to poorer results. Do we know all the interactions? No. Have we nevertheless stumbled across something that works? Yes.

So--I do think artificial sweeteners are probably a problem under certain conditions. They don't seem to be a problem for everybody. My personal experience--I'm more likely to binge on some foods if I add sweeteners to them and am not eating sufficiently ketogenically. From what I can tell, sweeteners in beverages don't affect my appetite. I haven't noticed them doing anything to my blood glucose, but it's possible that would only show up on a higher carb diet, it makes sense for sweet-sensors in the gut , pancreas etc. to have an effect on the body's response to a carbohydrate containing meal.

No doubt people react differently to AS. Do I believe AS are a cause or major contributing factor to T2D? No. Right now, there's nothing more than a correlation in a very complex metabolic problem. In my case, I choose not to consume AS. Whether that's protective for me or not, I know that aspartame is off limits for me. I'm getting to the point where I rarely use sweeteners of any kind including the "natural" ones like stevia, as I don't crave sweet foods anymore, so why indulge?

Cebola was correct, it is a very complex problem where there is likely not a single root cause. I would like to better understand the impact of AS on human health, and that will take time for costly studies to be funded. The AS producers will do all they can to discourage this approach.

Maria Emmerich has a recent blog post with an ice cream recipe using allulose. http://mariamindbodyhealth.com/allulose-ice-cream/ Never heard of it before. She says you can use it in ice cream without it hardening it like erythritol sweeteners do, so I'm interested in trying it.

Maria is generally fairly cautious about alternative sweeteners.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4937148/

Looks like this stuff won't kill dogs, like xylitol can. Does lower their blood glucose slightly, without increasing insulin.

I just make icecream with sugar-free koolaid and heavy cream. Hard as a rock, but it's pleasant chipping off bits to melt in my mouth. More patient people could just take it out of the freezer for a bit before eating it.

I have hypoglycemia and diet soda is an absolute horror. i have to eat to cover the soda that's supposed to be replacing sweets in my diet. I guess I have the AS bacteria. What if you stop using AS do the bacteria that are metabolizing it die?

With most calorie-free sweeteners, there's really nothing there to metabolize. Some sugar alcohols can be fermented. But with something like sucralose, if they have an effect on the gut bacteria, it's likely that it's working as a signalling molecule, there are taste receptors not only on the tongue but also in the gut and pancreas, and the gut bacteria themselves have sweet receptors.

Another possibility is a conditioned response, if your pancreas puts out just a little insulin when you taste something sweet, it's possible that causes a hypo. Or if you're just talking about hypo symptoms, rather than actually measuring blood glucose, maybe your body is putting out counter-regulatory hormones like cortisol or adrenaline in anticipation of the influx of sugar, and that's what you're symptoms come from.

It's amazing how trainable metabolism is. If you pair ringing a bell with doses of bacterial endotoxins, you can train rats to have an immune response to just ringing the bell.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...dangerous-ways/

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After 11 weeks, the mice receiving sugar were doing fine, whereas the mice fed artificial sweeteners had abnormally high blood sugar (glucose) levels, an indication that their tissues were having difficulty absorbing glucose from the blood.
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As a Low Carbers or No Carbers, we have a hard time getting enough glucose for our brain. Don't even think about absorbing glucose to fat or glycogen.

I kept pointing out that unless they do
Low Carb Low Fat
High Carb High Fat
Low Carb High Fat
High Carb Low Fat

That experiment is meaningless to us Low Carbers/Control Carbers.

I have medically tested hypo, wish I would have gotten insulin tested at the same time. Looking at my body fat locations its not hard to guess.