Replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners may help improve your gut microbiome

Using low-calorie sweeteners instead of sugar appears to give a boost to beneficial gut microbes and help people maintain weight loss. This result, one of the longest-running trials of sweeteners to date, suggests that these products may not be as harmful as some studies have suggested.

A series of studies in recent years have raised concerns that some low-calorie sweeteners may not be as healthy as they seem. They’re a popular choice for those trying to maintain weight, but research has found that they may trigger hunger, increase blood sugar, or increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. In 2023, Global Health Organization It issued guidelines advising against the use of low-calorie sweeteners for weight management.

But there are no long-term studies of sweeteners, especially in the context of a healthy diet. So Ellen Black At Maastricht University in the Netherlands, they tracked its effects in people who used it as a sugar substitute. She and her colleagues recruited 341 adults in Europe who were overweight or obese and put them on a low-calorie diet for two months, which resulted in an average weight loss of 10 kilograms.

Participants then followed a healthy diet containing less than 10% of calories from sugar. During this weight maintenance period, 171 participants were asked to avoid sweeteners completely, while the remainder were encouraged to replace sugary foods and drinks with alternatives made using low-calorie sweeteners. Participants used at least 16 types of sweeteners, and each individual could use as many types as they wanted.

After 10 months, people in the low-calorie sweetener group maintained a 1.6 kg greater weight loss, on average, than the sugar group. They also have a greater abundance of gut bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids, beneficial compounds that previous research suggests help regulate blood sugar, support heart health, and promote weight loss and maintenance.

“This suggests that replacing sugars in the diet with at least zero-calorie sweeteners may help you maintain body weight,” says Black. She says the results of this study may differ from previous studies because of its longer duration, and because it looked at the use of sweeteners in conjunction with a healthy diet. Additionally, previous studies have tended to focus on only a few low-calorie sweeteners, and not many of them side by side.

As for differences in gut bacteria, our understanding of the microbiome is still in its infancy, he says Eran Elinav At the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. So it’s difficult to explain how changes in the group using the sweeteners could have affected their health, he says, noting that it’s also not clear whether these changes occurred as a result of weight loss, low-calorie sweeteners or both.

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