Sweetener neotame can weaken gut, study finds

A sweetener used in cakes, soft drinks and chewing gum can seriously damage people’s health by weakening the gut, a study has found.

Consumption of even a small amount of the sweetener neotame can lead to someone starting to suffer irritable bowel syndrome, insulin resistance and even sepsis, a condition that kills about 40,000 people in Britain a year.

The findings underline that some of a new generation of sweeteners that give food products a supersweet taste can have a “toxic effect” on health, the researchers say.

Dr Havovi Chichger, the senior author of the study, said that while sweeteners could be a healthier alternative to sugar, some could harm consumers.

Neotame was developed in 2002 as a substitute for aspartame, a sweetener that has aroused concerns, and has become widely used in recent years in drinks and foodstuffs sold in the UK. It is often referred to as E961 on the list of ingredients found on labels of products.

Chichger, an associate professor at Anglia Ruskin University, and co-author Dr Aparna Shil, of Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh, said neotame carried a threat to health because it could damage the intestine by causing “good bacteria” to become diseased and invade the gut wall. In the process that might lead to illness because the epithelial barrier, part of the gut wall, could break down.

They published their findings, which they say are the first to show that neotame can have that damaging impact on healthy gut bacteria, in the medical journal Frontiers in Nutrition.

Previous research has found that other common sweeteners – such as saccharin, sucralose and aspartame – can also have that harmful effect.

“There is now growing awareness of the health impacts of sweeteners such as saccharin, sucralose and aspartame, with our own previous work demonstrating the problems they can cause to the wall of the intestine and the damage to the ‘good bacteria’ which form in our gut”, Chichger said.

“This can lead to a range of potential health issues including diarrhoea, intestinal inflammation, and even infections such as septicaemia if the bacteria were to enter the blood stream. Therefore, it is important to also study sweeteners that have been introduced more recently.”