A neuroscientist has warned of a seemingly “healthy” sugar alternative that “dramatically” increases your risk of type 2 diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes describes a common condition that causes your blood sugar levels to become high, raising your spectre of various health complications.
While the condition can cause warning signs like excessive thirst, needing to pee a lot and tiredness, many people have no symptoms, the NHS explains.
Worryingly, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), released last week, suggested that around one million Britons have the blood sugar condition without knowing it.
The findings also warned that many more people living in England – perhaps five million – could be on the verge of developing type 2 diabetes.
Robert Love, a neuroscientist specialising in helping people to prevent Alzheimer’s disease with science, took to his TikTok channel to issue a warning about a popular sweetener used in a variety of common diet drinks.
Speaking in the video, he said: “There’s a lot of controversy around this sugar alternative.
“Some people say it’s safe. Some people say, ‘Look at the data, it’s really unsafe’ – we are talking about aspartame.”
The expert referenced a 10-year study from France that found that artificial sweeteners increased the risk of diabetes by 69 percent.
Worryingly, aspartame doesn’t only spell bad news for your diabetes risk. A study from 2023 suggested that taking aspartame impairs memory and causes heritable damage.
Love said: “Male rats who had children – those rats actually had memory deficits if the daddy rat ate aspartame.
“So it shows that the memory deficits can be actually passed on genetically when people eat aspartame.”
The neuroscientist referenced another study that looked at 2,888 participants. After adjusting for factors like age, sex, education, calorie intake, smoking, and more, they found that those who drank artificial sweeteners had a substantially increased risk of both stroke and Alzheimer’s disease.
Fortunately, the expert highlighted drinks and sweeteners you could enjoy “instead”. He said: “Number one – you can try a soda sweetened with stevia or monk fruit sugar. Number two – you can just actually drink soda water – maybe squeeze a little fruit juice into that.
“And for sweeteners, allulose is a really healthy alternative that can actually help reduce weight.”
