The prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease has, it’s worth noting, sharply increased in recent decades.
Then there are artificial sweeteners like sucralose and saccharin, which we consume in diet sodas and “sugar-free” snacks in hopes of cutting calories. Our bodies can’t directly digest most of them — they’re meant to pass right through — but it turns out that the microbes inhabiting our colons can metabolize the sweeteners, potentially to our detriment.
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have found that, in mice, saccharin causes glucose intolerance, a marker of impending diabetes — and one disease that those who eat these sweeteners are probably trying to avoid. When the scientists transplanted microbes from mice fed saccharine to mice that hadn’t consumed the sweetener, the recipient animals developed glucose intolerance as well, suggesting that the microbiome that was warped by the sweetener, not the sweetener itself, was causing the problems.
"To determine the effects of NAS on glucose homeostasis, we addedcommercial formulations of saccharin, sucralose or aspartame to the drinking water of lean 10-week-old C57Bl/6 mice"
"Notably, at week 11, the three mouse groups that consumed water, glucose and sucrose featured comparable glucose tolerance curves, whereas all three NAS-consuming mousegroups developed marked glucose intolerance (P , 0.001, Fig. 1a, b)."
The article probably only talks about saccharin specifically because, as the study states: "...saccharin exerted the most pronounced effect, [so] we further studied its role as a prototype artificial sweetener."
(Trying to find another source, I believe Diet Pepsi from a fountain does as well, to extend shelf life.)
The only one I can think of is Tab. I tried it once, and I couldn't finish a can.
Diet coke has no sugar, no fat, and less than 100 mg sodium. The specific results from Nature are about trehalose, a sugar not found in diet coke. I'm not aware of any diet soda that contains it, either. I realize it's an opinion piece, but pseudoscience and speculative articles should not be the domain of NYT.
Of note, the zero-calorie definition of artificial sweeteners is based on the amount excreted in urine/stool: It should be very close to the ingested amount. I find it hard to believe the conclusion drawn by the authors that other sweeteners (sucralose and saccharin), are consumed by bacteria since the amount ingested matches the amount excreted.