Arithritol is a zero calorie, sugar-free sweetener that's used in all sorts of low-carb diet

drinks and food products.

Now, while I'm not a huge fan of people over-indulging these zero-calorie sweeteners,

I also think the media coverage and this study is grossly mischaracterizing the findings.

And today we're going to talk a little bit more about that.

The title of the study here is the artificial sweetener arithritol and cardiovascular event

risk.

It's important to recognize that this study had two different arms of it, the first arm,

which was a longitudinal association between elevated blood levels of arithritol and cardiovascular-related

events.

Over a three-year period of time, they had study subjects at Cleveland Clinic, I think

800 or 1000, and another subset or cohort was in Europe.

And essentially, what they found is that blood levels of arithritol were independently

associated with a higher risk for having a future carvascular-related event over the course

of the study.

But that doesn't tell the whole story because arithritol can be ingested exogenously.

You could have it in sugar-free drinks or sugar-free cookies, for example, that are sweetened

with arithritol.

But there's also a biochemical pathway known as the pentose phosphate pathway wherein glucose

and fructose can be converted into arithritol.

Now this is mostly characterized, at least previously, public studies have shown, that this

pentose phosphate pathway is upregulated in obesity and metabolic disease.

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