Sweet Poison

Its know for a while that artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame or saccharine, may not be completely harmless. They do not get absorbed to the body but satisfy your taste buds by fooling them for sugar. You can satisfy your sweet tooth but keep your belly fat right under your belt. There have been skirmishes in the scientific community about the health impact of these sugar substitutes. One study showed that it can derail your metabolism and prone you to Type II diabetes. The study proposed that by taking these sweeteners you activate the parts of the brain that is supposed to be activated when you take sugar and it initiate a chain of metabolic reaction to digest sugar, when in fact there is no sugar in your system.

A much more interesting explanation for the predilection of users of artificial sweeteners to T-2 diabetes came out few weeks back in the journal Nature. The authors found that artificial sweeteners alter your gut microbe. Mice fed with artificial sweeteners have a change in the composition of their gut microbe and eventually they became diabetic. More interestingly, transplantation of the altered gut microbe to normal mice resulted in a change microbial flora of the recipient and made them diabetic. Similar result was reproduced in human subjects too. This is the first study showing the impact of a food/food additive in altering your body physiology by changing the bacteria in your body.

As a side note, your body has more number of bacterial cells than your own cells! I was wondering are we more prokaryotic than eukaryotic? Lets forget for a second that human genome is several order larger than bacterial genome. Lets say, if aliens digest a whole human being and sequence the genomic DNA what species would they categorize us into? Humans or Bacteria?