Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're exploring artificial sweetness. Back in July 1982, Coca-Cola launched a groundbreaking new product, Diet Coke,

a healthier alternative for those Coke fans looking to cut back on sugar and manage their weight.

Sounds great, right? Well, maybe not. You see, Diet Coke and many other low sugar drinks rely on artificial sweetness.

And while they were once seen as a smart swap, emerging research is raising serious concerns about their long-term effect on our health.

In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Iranilenev and Professor Tim Specter to break down the latest

science and explore how these sweeteners impact our gut microbiome.

What is an artificial sweetener? Why do they exist?

So artificial sweeteners, which are currently re-termed, non-nutrative sweeteners, are a very diverse group of chemicals that feature a very intense sweet taste.

In other words, they are much better than natural sugar

in engaging and inducing taste receptors,

which lead to our brain interpreting their tastes as intensely sweet.

So there are hundreds of times sweeter than the natural sugar.

And these artificial compounds were developed and discovered over a century ago as means of

satisfying people's sweet tooth without paying the caloric price.

So I think the first of these compounds was saccharine, which was discovered over a hundred

years ago, and it was used as an inexpensive and intensely sweet substitute to sugar.

These compounds have been extensively integrated into human diet with the hope and belief that we would generate this pleasurable, intense, sweet taste to many of our foods.

So these compounds can be found both as an independent additives to coffee and so on and so forth, but also if you were to go to your local supermarket and look at the ingredient links of many foods, you would find these compounds integrated in many cases without explicitly telling the consumers that they're there.

It's actually very hard and very difficult to, it was one of our biggest challenges to find

individuals who are not exposed to these compounds in their daily lives.

And there's a huge range of them on there.

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