Glad I never got into Keto prepared products or erythritol

We diabetics use artificial sweeteners a lot, and most of them, be they stevia, monkfruit, or whatever, are bulked up with erythritol. You have to check label ingredients to avoid it.

but not a lot. Lilly's chocolate bars has it. I just encouraged my diabetic wife to eat it instead of her normal chocolate. Maybe I need to rethink that recommendation.

No free lunch it seems. If it is sweet, it is bad for you in some way. I guess shut up and eat your blackberries.

I switched to stevia as a healthier alternative to other sweeteners. I don't think I'd fall in the range they're talking about though, with less than a tsp each in two cups of coffee a day. More in my summer fruit smoothies.

I wonder if this stuff might eventually be useful for that. A lot of great medical discoveries have come out of left field like this.

In the meantime, studies of sucralose and aspartame have been so all over the place that it appears they're mostly useful as studies of confirmation bias. Bottom line: they're safe if you don't overdo, something that can also be said of water.

A good overview without a hell of a lot of Medicalese is at https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/78/9/725/5739345?login=false

Same a Nutrasweet. Have for a long time. Ironically stevia has been pushed as an alternative to artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose (Splenda) because it's "natural", as if that automatically makes it safer.

The studies seem to be inconclusive; some researchers said they would continue to use it. The worrying results only occurred in people who already had heart conditions. That's not me. I will be careful, though, with dishes I make for husband, who has high blood pressure.

which I use daily in my coffee and in baking.

Back to sugar.

Thank you for posting this.

While the more expensive Truvia brand seems to all have erythritol, many "generic" store brand Stevia products do not list erythritol along with stevia in their ingredients. So far only erythritol is linked to the blood clotting problem.

that said, sugar-free, zero-calorie, diet, healthy, low-fat, etc. In the last couple of years, the list has expanded to include anything with the words keto, paleo and gluten-free.

I get it on Amazon. I looked at the ingredients, and it appears there's no erythritol.

but the individual packs of Truvia and individual packs of Aldi's Stevia had erythritol listed so I have tossed them esp. since spouse has a hereditary blood clotting condition and is on warfarin. We don't use those little packs much anyway

Fortunately the big bags we have of Stevia from Aldi and Ingles don't have erythritol listed and that's what we use most often.

Last edited Tue Feb 28, 2023, 03:45 AM - Edit history (1)

They are taking people who already have major health problems are probably obease, have metabolic syndrom to begin with and are switching from sugar to these artificial sweetners near the end of their life to get a handle on things like insulin resistance.

However, this part does show cause and effect: Additional lab and animal research presented in the paper revealed that erythritol appeared to be causing blood platelets to clot more readily. Clots can break off and travel to the heart, triggering a heart attack, or to the brain, triggering a stroke.

After reading that part I would not touch the stuff.

Then I found this fellow who noticed the same thing:

intriguing. And, a pint of ice cream? That's a lot of ice cream for one serving - seems that might kind of skew the work.