Jeffrey Bland discusses research showing that synthetic sweeteners like sucralose and aspartame can impair HDL cholesterol function at typical beverage consumption levels, without changing HDL particle count. This subtle molecular change may increase disease risk over time, especially in genetically susceptible people.
Well, as you can see, here we are back in the studio again and I have an interesting little thought I might want to share with you. Actually, I do want to share it with you and I hope you'll find it interesting. That relates to this sugar substitute question. As you know, we have this big debate about are there adverse effects from alternative sweeteners, non sucrose derived sweeteners, things that are things like sucralose and cyclamate and saccharin and, and aspartame. And people have really over the years been back and forth on this controversy saying, well, you know, large studies have been done showing they're non toxic in animals and other people say, oh no, they have very serious adverse effects. Well, here's a new little factoid that I think you'll find interesting and you can make your own conclusion from it, but I think it's certainly interesting. So let me if I can set the tone for this real quickly. As you know, in our blood we have different types of blood fats. And you've heard about both cholesterol and then you hear about LDL and you hear about HDL and you hear about LDL being the bad cholesterol and you hear about HDL being the good cholesterol. Well, it turns out that hdl, the good cholesterol, has a lot of different personalities about that. And I won't go into the technical details just to suffice it to say different forms of HDL have differing degrees of health promoting benefit. So it's not just the number hdl, it's the, the actual function of HDL that determines its health benefit. So recently some investigators have got the idea, based on their ability to measure the function, the type of hdl, that maybe they should examine what happens when people consume what would be considered normal amounts of synthetic sweeteners, say the amount you would get in a large soft drink and see if it has any influence on the function of hdl, meaning not the number in the blood, but how it's actually able to do its work as a health promoting lipoprotein. So in this study they gave human volunteers, presumably healthy, a certain level of the synthetic sweeteners, things like sucralose or things like aspartame. And they then examined later the effects that it had, if any, on their function of their hdl, the friendly HDL molecule. When I say friendly, what I mean is health promoting hdl. And what they found is, lo and behold, in consuming the amount of sweeteners that you might get in a normal diet, if you were consuming a lot of synthetically sweetened beverages or products, that it had an adverse effect on the function of the hdl. The number of HDL particles remained the same, but their ability to do their good job was blunted. This was quite a remarkable effect. They actually go through the mechanism of how that works. And I won't go into the great technical details, but it opens up a very interesting question, doesn't it? And the question is, how do we really examine the subtle effects of some new substance in the environment, say a new additive or a new chemical that's put into our environment? How do we examine the subtle effects on physiology? It's more than just its toxicological effects, meaning did it kill that person? It's more than its direct cancer producing effects or not producing effects. It's actually looking at the subtle functional effects that that molecule might have on regulating the body's subtle works in such a way that over time it alters outcome, meaning that it increases the risk of some dysfunction, particularly maybe in certain genetically susceptible individuals. These are questions in toxicology, this is called molecular toxicology that are just now being really studied with the new tools of cell physiology, genomic analysis and so forth. And I think this examination of the synthetic sweetener effects on HDL is a classic example of that. And as to how subtle effects might produce over decades of living, adverse outcomes of unknown origin, we just say, well, that person just got heart disease. I don't know where it came from, their cholesterol levels were not high. But maybe these are subtle effects that influence ultimate outcome. And they're influenced ultimately by regulation through molecules that we say, well, they're safe, they didn't kill any animals. Interesting part of the chapter story. So the HDL story connected to the synthetic sweetener story. A new chapter in our understanding of the regulation of our function through our environment. Thanks to.
