Sorbitol
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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They are strongly implying that this may also apply to other sugar alcohols like erythritol, xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, and lactitol.
Pretty click-baity. They found out sorbitol was one step from fructose, which the researchers are actually studying
The headline (and the article for that matter) are very sensationalist and I don't think they've presented this in a balanced way. They are discussing how sorbitol behaves in zebrafish with limited data presented on human biochemistry, and they discuss it in a vacuum without quantifying the amount of sorbitol it takes to cause a problem. Yes, any substance in excess can be harmful, but the amount of sorbitol in food compared to the amount of high fructose corn syrup makes it the substantially lesser evil. The artificial sweeteners are vastly more potent than actual sugar, so you don't need very much of it to get the same amount of sweetness. High fructose corn syrup is used in massive amounts in food and is much worse for you on the scale that either substance would be consumed.
This is the correct comment. People are very quick to demonize food and food manufacturers, and I'm not saying they aren't making money on stuff that could be bad for us, but my understanding is that a lot of food additives that people worry about have been proven safe at reasonable consumption levels.
We are not zebrafish! Usually, anyway. And no dose info? Suspect.
Water will kill you if you drink too much of it. Everything in moderation!
Ah, yes! Food!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkphooryVyQ
It's a hard watch so click at your own peril.
As it turns out when you overload your liver your liver is overloaded.
It's quite hard to actually overload your liver with the artificial sweeteners unless you are drinking literal gallons of zero sugar pop a day or eating nothing besides artificially sweetened foods. The stuff is used in such tiny concentrations that someone would have to deliberately seek out overdosing on this stuff to get the same effects as the experimental animals are getting (because the experimental animals are being fed pure sorbitol in doses that no human could reasonably consume.)
That's the problem with articles like this is that they don't emphasize that they are only seeing this in animal models and they don't disclose just how much of the stuff they had to give to the animal for the negative effects to occur. It's also a bad study because it doesn't account for the differences in the physiology and biochemistry between humans and zebrafish, nor does it account for the confounding factors in humans. You know who drinks and eats a lot of artificially sweetened things? People with diabetes and people who are trying to lose weight. These are people that are likely to already have fatty liver disease and the sorbitol didn't really have much to do with it.
What I don’t get is why it took them decades to figure this out.
Well that's how it works with just about everything in high-tech capitalism. Enterprise & profits first, downstream and knock-on effects examined later. Just look at plastics, nicotine, pesticides, etc etc.
I also tend to think that sorbitol and other replacements aren't necessarily terrible in themselves, but look at the way they're used-- a typical diet drink / food item doesn't attempt to lower overall sweetness levels, it attempts to replace almost 100% of the sweetness with the artificial product, killing much of the point of doing so.
The good news is that consumers can be trained and untrained over time to crave excess sugars, salt, fat, fried food, etc. So you can reprogram your tastes over time, and get used to vastly lower quantities of unhealthy substances. For example, I used to drink and get normalised upon store-bought iced teas, which contain drastic amounts of sucrose / corn syrup. I just make it myself now, using a single packet of sucralose and a single sugar cube (15 kcals) in about 28fl oz brewed tea (Gatorade bottle). It took time, but it tastes perfectly sweet now, to me.
Well, sorbitol makes you shit like the devil's own firehose, so if anyone thought it was totally fine they were probably not paying attention.
After a certain age you may opt hor whetever moves it through ya
Naturally occurring sorbitol in prunes is what makes them a good laxative. And honestly, the extreme diarrhea from sorbitol isn’t related to what this article is saying is a potential health problem.
But the amount of sorbitol needed to cause liver strain as described in the article is going to be more than the amount needed to cause diarrhea, so it seems like a moot point.
Also you might need to be a fish
Yeah this doesn't sound like such a bad thing TBH
A decades long double blind controlled study is FAR beyond the GRAS standard that requiring it would stifle not only commerce but also science in general.
That's why sometimes we don't see bad effects in food until decades later.
But Stevia is still save?