Six popular artificial sweeteners approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—aspartame, sucralose, neotame, saccharine, advantame and acesulfame potassium-k—were found to be toxic to digestive gut microbes in a new paper published in Molecules. Researchers at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University tested each sweetener along with 10 sports drinks that contained them.

They discovered that otherwise healthy bacteria found in the digestive system became toxic when they came into contact with even one mg/ml (less than one-hundredth of a teaspoon) of the artificial sweeteners.

This article appears in the January 2019 issue of Natural Awakenings.