Welcome back to the nutrition science podcast.

I am your host, Dr. Adrian Chavez, and in this episode, we are going to be discussing artificial sweeteners.

Are they really a safe alternative to sugar?

And artificial sweeteners might be one of the most controversial topics in nutrition and health.

Some people will tell you that they're completely safe and there's absolutely nothing to worry about.

And other people will tell you that they cause weight gain,

disrupt our metabolism, disrupt our microbiome, and cause cancer. And so what's the truth?

And why is there so much controversy around this topic? So that's what we're going to get into

today. And there's lots of cover in this topic. So we're going to go ahead and jump right into the

episode and start talking about artificial sweeteners. So we're going to go ahead and jump right into the episode and start

talking about artificial sweeteners. So first, let's define what artificial sweeteners are.

Artificial sweeteners are part of a larger group of sweeteners defined as non-nutrative sweeteners.

This larger group of sweeteners includes artificial sweeteners, but it also includes natural non-nutrative

sweeteners such as things like stevia and monk fruit, along with sugar alcohols such as

erythritol, manitol, sorbitol, and other types of sugar alcohols.

Now, the difference between these different categories is the

artificial sweeteners, the things that we're going to be discussing today, include things like

aspartame, acetylpham k, saccharin, and sucralose. These are artificially synthesized compounds

versus sugar alcohols, which are naturally occurring, and things like

Stevia and Monkfruit, which are also naturally occurring as well. To date, most of the controversy

with this category of foods is in reference to the artificial sweeteners. We don't really have any

data to warrant concerns with consumption of the natural non-nutrative

...