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‘Sweetheart of food industry’ – Zero-calorie sweetener linked to strokes & heart attacks

A study by journal ‘Nature Medicine’ says people with existing risk factors for heart disease were twice as likely to be affected.

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New Delhi: A zero-calorie, sugar replacement called erythritol, which is artificially manufactured in massive quantities, can cause blood clotting, stroke, heart attack and even death, according to a study.

A sugar alcohol, erythritol is a carb found naturally in many fruits and vegetables and has about 70 per cent of the sweetness of sugar. Artificially, it is used to sweeten stevia and keto-reduced sugar products, researchers said.

The study by journal ‘Nature Medicine,’ published Monday, says people with existing risk factors for heart disease, like diabetes, were twice as likely to experience a heart attack or a stroke if they had the highest levels of erythritol in the blood.

“If your blood level of erythritol was in the top 25 per cent compared to the bottom 25 per cent, there was about a two-fold higher risk for heart attack and stroke. It’s on par with the strongest of cardiac risk factors, like diabetes,” CNN quoted lead study author Dr Stanley Hazen, Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute.

The study also found that erythritol appeared to cause 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,” the report said.

In response to the study, industry association Calorie Control Council told CNN that “the results of this study are contrary to decades of scientific research showing reduced-calorie sweeteners like erythritol are safe, as evidenced by global regulatory permissions for their use in foods and beverages”.

CNN further quoted Hazen as saying: “Erythritol looks like sugar, it tastes like sugar, and you can bake with it… It’s become the sweetheart of the food industry, an extremely popular additive to keto and other low-carb products and foods marketed to people with diabetes… Some of the diabetes-labeled foods we looked at had more erythritol than any other item by weight.”

The discovery of the connection between erythritol and cardiovascular issues was purely accidental, Hazen said. The scientist’s research had one goal – “to find unknown chemicals or compounds in a person’s blood that might predict their risk for a heart attack, stroke or death in the next three years. To do so, the team began analysing 1,157 blood samples in people at risk for heart disease collected between 2004 and 2011.”

Hazen said: “We found this substance that seemed to play a big role, but we didn’t know what it was. Then we discovered it was erythritol, a sweetener.”


Also read: Study creates new human organoid models of fatty liver disease


 

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