It’s been almost a decade since Jotham Suez, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins University, first started looking into artificial sweeteners and their health effects. In 2014, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, he worked on a study in mice that suggested artificial sugar alternatives present in everything from lipsticks to toothpaste could lead to obesity and related health condition like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
Those early findings sparked controversy, says Suez. Though the study wasn’t the first time scientists had looked at the link between artificial sweeteners and obesity, it was the first one to detail a potential mechanism for it: The sweeteners changed the intestinal bacteria of mice, which play important roles in regulating metabolism, appetite, and fat storage.
“The food industry went ballistic because obviously this is a major threat,” says Robert Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist at University of California, San Francisco, who ...
