artificial sweeteners – Public Health Expert, University of Otago, New Zealand

Dr Helen Eyles, Dr Wilma Waterlander (both from The National Institute for Health Innovation), Professor Tony Blakely

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll be aware that sugar and its negative impact on dental caries, body weight, and other long-term health conditions such as diabetes, is highly topical. The World Health Organization has recently announced that we should reduce our daily sugar intake to less than 5% of total energy. In this blog, we consider two new articles assessing the evidence for artificial sweeteners and their impact on body weight and metabolism – one a lab experiment on mice published in Nature that was widely covered in the media, and one a systematic review of human studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The former shows deleterious effects of artificial sweeteners on the glucose metabolism of mice, but the later net benefits of artificially sweetened beverages on body weight among humans.

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Artificially sweetened beverages: What does the latest evidence tell us on health benefits versus harm?

Should you swap sugar for artificial sweetener? Maybe not if you’re a mouse, but what if you’re a human?

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