One of my friends posted:
So, before you all throw away your Swerve…
When I read the article on erythritol for the first time yesterday, a couple of things jumped out.
1. The authors said they discovered this link “by accident”. Right there, we need to stop. This means that they were not controlling for any concomitant factors. That means erythritol may have nothing to do with the clots at all.
2. The article never said whether any of these people were at risk for clots from other conditions. Were they diabetic? Heart disease? Turns out, the answer is yes.
3. The article made no mention of other dietary risk factors that existed in these people. Did they consume a lot of sugar? Well, it appears none of them were on any specific diet.
4. Where did the erythritol in their blood come from?
Then today, I see this.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=582902963507483&id=100044250288155&mibextid=NnVzG8
So, a quick Google search turned up a very simple explanation for the results found in this paper.
Sugar is metabolized into sugar alcohol in the body. In fact, blood sugar alcohol from sugar metabolism and blood sugar alcohol from erythritol are practically indistinguishable in the blood.
During the time of the study (2011-2016), keto wasn’t much of a thing and erythritol wasn’t widely available on the market to begin with. There is no explanation by the authors as to how these people would have been able to consume a product that wasn’t even available on the market during that time.
So, now let’s put 2 and 2 together.
1. Sugar alcohol from sugar and erythritol are identical in the blood.
2. Study participants were not on a controlled diet.
3. Study participants had health conditions known to be exacerbated by sugar.
4. Blood clots are caused by sugar. (In a super simple explanation, sugar makes blood sticky; fat makes blood slick. Sugar causes clots; dietary fat does not, although not all fats are created equal).
5. These people likely had no to limited ability to consume erythritol during that time frame.
So, did the nonexistent erythritol cause the clots? Or was it sugar?
Y’all, it was the sugar.
This “study” is very much like me saying “I ate an organic meal, then I got a headache, so organic foods cause headaches.”
This very much reminds of the industry funded hatchet job on coconut oil a few years ago. Remember when the FDA told us that a “study” showed that coconut oil caused heart attacks and we should all eat corn oil? Then we found out that the corn industry funded that “study”?
I suspect something similar is behind this bogus “study” as well.
As for myself, I don’t like erythritol. I am one of the unlucky few who detect an unpleasant cooling sensation from erythritol. For most people it has a neutral taste and causes less bloat and gastric upset than other sugar alcohols. I don’t think there is any reason to ditch your erythritol based on this article.
And PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE stop sharing things if you haven’t vetted the accuracy of it. That happened with the coconut oil fiasco too. People started freaking out, sharing the article, saying “OMG, stop eating coconut oil”, only to find out later that the study was bogus. It took me longer to write this post than it did to research the truth of the article. All total, I have spent 20 minutes.
Twenty minutes and I can feel confident that I am sharing information that is as accurate as possible based on the data we have.