Dr. Ben Bikman discusses a new study on allulose, a sweetener that reduced weight gain and improved metabolic markers in rats compared to stevia. The research suggests allulose may offer real metabolic health benefits beyond just being a sugar substitute.
I am delighted to share with you the results of a manuscript that was just published from my lab. Here is the name or the title of the manuscript so you can look it up. It is open access, so you can find it and read all of it. Some of the details or the highlights that I'd like to share. Basics here are that we took animals, some rats, and then over 12 weeks, we fed them either a standard diet to keep them lean, or a western diet, which is high fat, high sugar to make them much chubbier. And within these two groups, each group also was either consuming stevia or allulose. And we found that the western diet animals that were given stevia were the fattest. This isn't to say that stevia is somehow harmful. It's not. However, it didn't appear to help, which is what allulose did. Allulose resulted in about half of the weight gain that we saw in the control group of the Western diet animals. This was, of course, accompanied by substantial improvements in insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance. The liver appeared to have more glycogen, which could provide an athletic benefit for endurance events. We also found significantly reduced inflammation markers and a host of other benefits that I invite you to read the study and look at some of these for yourself. But suffice it to say, the results continue to suggest that allulose is a very promising rare sugar and a sugar replacement.
