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Scientists Link Popular Sugar Substitute to Liver Disease
(scitechdaily.com)
It’s sorbitol.
The real mvp right here, fuck headlines like this
But if they just put it in the title, people won't click and get bombarded with ads! Think of the big corporations!
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(2 replies)
But…isn’t sorbitol a laxative??
I learned that one the hard way with some delicious sorbitol candies as a teenager.
Yes. Its also a sweetener.
all the -tols are laxatives, you heard ethyrthiol, i think its one of the potent ones that cause laxative effects the most. i heard tons of people were getting cramps or diarrhea for people who sensitive. some people are mildly affected by it, and some has no effect.
Sorbitol-degrading Aeromonas bacterial strains convert the sugar alcohol into a harmless bacterial byproduct.
“However, if you don’t have the right bacteria, that’s when it becomes problematic. Because in those conditions, sorbitol doesn’t get degraded and as a result, it is passed on to the liver,” he said.
Pretty big caveat but the sensationalist headline is all people will see.
... In fish.
And after they had depleted the zebrafish's gut microbiota.
Do you think scientists start doing qualitative testing on humans first???
No, but I do expect people to assume this is based on humans which it isnt. If this research eventually gets there then we can see what it says, but for now it's just another click bait article.
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(7 replies)
The article doesn't read as very concerning. Too much of anything usually means bad. Under the right conditions anything can be bad. Figuring out what can be bad and when it can be bad can often take decades. Don't stress too much on trying to optomize out anything that can do you harm in a diet. You'd have nothing left to eat and even the greatest collective of biologist getting together to make the greatest nutritional shake meal replacement would probably miss something that causes issues decades down the line or people drink too much and overdose
Tbh I am betting that it's gonna come out that they've known about the health risks all along, but they tried to ignore/cover it up for profit reasons.
Copied from another posting of this article:
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.
The scientific paper grift chain: get private funding from a company to publish a paper, use wild methodology, have the shit denounced and condemned by mainstream academia but not before every fucking news outlet in the world puts out a headline "BREAKING: SCIENTIFIC PAPER LINKS EATING SALAD TO BRAIN-EXPLODING DISEASE"
Never mind that to get this evidence they had to inject a marmot with enough salad dressing directly into its skull to make it explode thousand-island grey matter across its cage.
There's a whole cycle of perverse incentives with University Press.
The underlying research is necessary and valuable but the marketing arm of universities blow everything out of proportion.
Give up sugar. Try it, and tell me it isn't addictive.
Give up all sweeteners, because keeping them just makes you crave more, making it much harder.
I gave up sugar, and most fruits except berries. It made staying at my ideal weight MUCH easier. I really don't need to think about it, I weigh myself every few weeks, and I'm always at my ideal weight. Exercise is the other part of the equation, I think we need to do both.
Oh who fucking cares? Everything we eat and breath is poison now. There is no saving anyone anymore.
Excuse me but I'm a better cook than that. Delicious poison is on the menu
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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