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Scientists Link Popular Sugar Substitute to Liver Disease
(scitechdaily.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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I’m not sure why people expected all these sugar substitutes to be harmless
The entire notion of sugar substitution in the first place should be such an insane concept to everyone but somehow we’ve instead created a diet soda and junk food entitlement
Honest question: what about this makes it obviously "insane"?
Ingesting chemicals to mimic sugar so you can have sweet things with no caloric consequences doesn’t seem insane to you?
i drink chemical called water. i add a bunch of chemicals clumped up in bean form, then roast those beans, and grind them up sometimes and call it coffee. I sprinkle in a chemical, sucrose, we call sugar. It's all chemicals. I love chemicals. You love chemicals. We are all chemicals. You know why? Because you are made of dna. Guess what DNA is made of? That's right, chemicals baby. DNA needs more chemicals to make more copies of itself. Without more chemicals, it would have to break the laws of thermodynamics to replicate itself. More chemicals are needed.
every time you think "they're feeding us chemicals" as opposed to what? use synthetic or naturally occurring as a distinction or something. I am partial to lab juice.
Sugar is also a chemical. You simply can't just say because "chemical" because that doesn't make any sense. Sugar is actually 2 chemicals, so by that logic a sugar replacement that is only 1 chemical, should statistically be half as risky, based on the "chemical" logic, and by that logic make a lot of sense to use instead.
Just to be a bit more charitable to their point, what word should they use instead of chemical when, broadly speaking about such things?
I’m aware of the fact that sorbitol might be a bad example. Replace it with aspartame. What word should they use to avoid getting told sugar is a chemical?
I’m not looking to argue, I just find the “everything is a chemical” rhetoric to be a bit obnoxious. And I think both sides could be making their points in a less adversarial way.
Maybe synthetic, since it a synthesized chemical rather than a refined.
But honestly that's not really better, because synthesized is not inherently bad either.
I think what he meant was that these sugar substitutes are not natural to have in the amount possible with industrialized food.
But then again, the exact same thing goes for sugar.
There is no obvious argument IMO why sorbitol or any other alternative sweetener would be harmful.
And it is still far from certain that even if sorbitol can cause liver disease, that it is MORE harmful than sugar, that we know can cause a long range of diseases like diabetes and heart attacks.
Nothing is safe if you take high enough volumes of it. If you drink 5 liters of water quickly, it can cause brain swelling, and you can die from that too. And water is probably the least harmful substance you can take.
My conclusion is that the "point" is simply wrong, even when being as charitable as you can possibly be.
One thing to add, synthetic/artificial only describes some of the sugar alternatives. Others, such as stevia and erithritol, are perfectly natural. Doesn't make them any safer (or more dangerous), as you noted.
Exactly lots of things that are natural are harmful, while some synthetics are harmless.
Harmless within the limitation that everything in excess is harmful.
What things? There is no sub-group of chemicals whose sheer presence automatically makes a food harmful. The replacement is a different argument.
Y’all are being difficult and pedantic when you could rise above that. Especially given my specific question.
And I wasn’t asking you.
This isn't pedantic, it's the answer, unless you can specifically tell me what "such things" are.
You're asking a question in a public forum, I don't see how me answering is offensive.
That’s the thing, I’m not sure what “such things” are, but I know “chemicals” is a bad classification. I mean food ingredients that have been later shown to be toxic or harmful. Or that have developed a such a reputation, even if the evidence is mixed or misinterpreted.
Trans fats wouldn’t be called a “chemical” but we use to think they were pretty awesome. And after looking around, it seems like sulfites are banned in some food contexts. I’m not finding as many examples as I would have assumed, tho.
So what’s the word for things that have been found to be bad and thus removed from food and drink? Or that have not been yet removed in all parts of the world, but are considered risky.
I wasn’t debating toxicity. I wasn’t talking about if any one example is truly toxic or not. That was what I was trying to avoid. All I wanted was a better word. Because “EVERYTHING IS A CHEMICAL” is a shitty response, and it seemed to me that telling the person water is a chemical is unproductive, and just being a dick. What word is not inclusive of all matter?
"Chemicals that have been shown to be harmful enough to warrant caution". I don't know what else to tell you.
The thing is, this specific chemical that we're talking about hadn't been shown to be harmful until now (and as you can see by the discussion elsewhere the jury is still out on if it has indeed been shown) so they couldn't have used that phrase either to argue that it should have been obvious why ingesting it is a bad idea.
I don’t care if it’s toxic or increases the human lifespan.
I was calling out people being shitty to each other. And by asking about what word would be more appropriate, I was trying to make a point that would illuminate how smugly stating “everything is a chemical” is shitty. It comes off as neckbeard bullshit. It’s exemplary of public forums being toxic.
And I’ll reiterate again, I’m not defending the toxicity of anything here. I was just looking for a way for the discourse on the subject to avoid jerks replying that they drink water, a chemical, every day.
This is also why I said I wasn’t talking to you. Because I wasn’t trying to make a point with you. I was engaging with the person I replied to. But here you are talking about the toxicity of a specific thing, instead of seeing my point.
You were asking what word they should have used instead of "chemicals" and I told you the one option that might be appropriate if not for the specific circumstances. What else do you want?
No. This may be obvious to you because you have knowledge that I lack.
Seems pretty ridiculous on face. Everyone is comfortable acknowledging how evil food and chemical companies are, and that is not new info
This is the equivalent of believing tobacco companies about cigarettes and then being super surprised down the line that they either lied or didn’t do enough research
You're not explaining what is obvious about this.
Ingesting chemicals created by known bad actors in the food and chemical industry for the purpose of having those same bad actors sell you unlimited addictive sweets…
I mean come on
If your entire argument is "food industry bad", that's not very convincing. Do you somehow produce everything you eat yourself? Do you make your own clothes too, from resources you collected yourself? Did you collect the resources to make the device you post on yourself and put them together?
I do my best to purchase the most sustainable and quality versions of any given offering I can. I’ll also readily acknowledge the harms and where we do and don’t have choices
But I’m not sure how you jumped from the notion that the industries behind artificial sweeteners, who we already know are verifiably bad and overtly acting against the interests of public health to… you didn’t make your own clothes so artificial sweeteners are actually safe and awesome 🤪
Like the other dude said, if your only argument is "OMG, everybody knows that corporations are evil, they must be selling poison", that doesn't rise to the level of obvious.
It's like saying that since the US federal government in the 60s was racist and transphobic, they must have faked the moon landing.
If it were "obvious" that a sugar substitute was dangerous, the sugar companies would have trumpeted that as loudly as they could.
I never said artificial sweeteners are safe and awesome, don't put words in my mouth. What I said was that if your argument is "food industry bad therefore sweeteners bad", you can't trust and buy absolutely anything from any industry.
WTF are you on about? Sorbitol is a sugar alcohol that is found naturally in fruit, AFAIK all research until now has shown sorbitol to be less harmful than sugar, especially to your teeth. Sorbitol is generally made from starch while normal sugar is a refined product.
What about this makes Sorbitol obviously harmful?
Seems like you are making a giant argument from ignorance.
For me, I think there could be room for scientific advancement. I mean look at all we have today that we wouldn't think possible decades ago. And people are still finding new foods. Food scientists are a thing. While there are bad actors out there sometimes if its really cool and really good, you can have a new product good for the public and profitable.
Like the other poster said, I'm no scientist by any means. Its not out of the question for our society to have artificial sweeteners that aren't bad for us. There's many out there. Maybe some are bad, maybe some okay for our health.
You make me sad to be part of the same species.
Injecting chemicals just so you can have sweet things power your muscle performance without buildup of acetone doesn’t seem insane to you?
Sugar is a chemical, you dumb fuck.
Injecting chemicals for increased muscle performance DOES seem insane to me
Try again
Is your objection to substitutions? Because that's a very arbitrary line. Why is it that we call sorbitol a sugar substitute instead of calling sugar a sorbitol substitute? Grind up some plums to make juice, remove the sorbitol, add some sucrose in its place. Doesn't sound all that different.
Sugar isn't harmless.
It is if you don’t eat too much
But aspartame will literally damage the DNA in your colon because it’s inherently genotoxic to our cells
The DNA damage comes from the formaldehyde that the body produces when metabolizing aspartame, but guess what? The body makes formaldehyde anyway, just from its natural metabolic processes. As long as you don't consume too much it's fine.
The problem is over-consumption, which is the basis of having a consumer economy. If everyone ate less the food industry would collapse. They need us to overeat and if we ever stopped they'd have to reconcile with the fact that they can't just keep growing their profits infinitely. Plus, when we overeat, they can make even more money by treating the sicknesses it causes. Win/Win!
Don't consume either. Artificial sweeteners are UPFs and sugar in all its forms have no place in the human diet.
If you remove sugar in all its forms from your diet then you'd better forget about eating any plants whatsoever. Cellulose is sugar, carbs are sugar. Where do you think we get our energy from?
Amino acids and fat. Why do we need sugar? It's not an essential nutrient.
Lipids (fat) also gets converted into glucose before your body can use it. If we're cutting out sugar in all forms then that counts too.
That is also my understanding. We needn't consume any exogenous sugars in any form, since the body is able to make all it needs.
That's nothing near to what I said. To reiterate my statement, there is no requirement for sugar in the human diet.
Your previous comment definitely says "sugar in all its forms"
Yes, in the human diet. Fats are not a form of sugar.
Except it is, fat is how we store sugars. Lipids are made from glucose. It is sugar just in another form. If you eat glucose it gets turned into lipids and if you eat lipids it gets turned into glucose. All of our energy comes from turning food into glucose. You couldn't survive if you didn't have some form of sugar in your diet.
I'm not sure what to say to that. Are you asserting that fat is a form of sugar? I don't believe that to be case. One of the obvious differences is that sugars are water soluble, but fats are not.
Triglycerides do contain a glycerol backbone, but aren't sugars. In any case I will revise my statement. Don't eat carbohydrates, get your nutrition from protein and the associated fat.
Edit:
In lipolysis, our bodies break down triglycerides into both fatty acids and glycerol. Most of our cells are also able to metabolize fatty acids for energy, not just glucose.
Unless we conflate fat with sugars, it is perfectly possible to survive (and indeed thrive!) without eating any form of sugar at all. Again, the human body is capable of making all the glucose it needs.
Indeed, we should all be trying to reduce even sugar to 0
If there is a food Overton window it’s a solar system away from a normal diet
They have been used for decades without issue.
It takes decades to do the research or develop the issues
Genotoxicity of aspartame
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4235942/
Cancer risk of Erythritol
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/07/250718035156.htm
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/sugar-substitutes-new-cardiovascular-concerns
Hope you dont use salt, that can cause cancer
I can tell you know a lot about biology.