Truvia is an insecticide!

Truvia is an insecticide. It kills bugs.

When people ask me if it is a good sugar substitute, the answer is simple: NO!

Truvia sweetener is made from about 99.5% erythritol (sugar alcohol) and 0.5% rebiana, an extract from the stevia plant.

A very concerning new study was just published in the journal PLOS ONE titled, Erythritol, a Non-Nutritive Sugar Alcohol Sweetener and the Main Component of Truvia, Is a Palatable Ingested Insecticide.

The authors wanted to see if this sweetener was safe for consumption. They used fruit flies as a way to test this hypothesis.

The study found that while fruit flies normally live between 39 and 51 days, those that ate the Truvia ingredient erythritol died in less than a week.

Truvia, which is made by food giant Cargill, is, therefore, a potent insecticide that kills fruit flies!

It may not be surprising because erythritol is made from yeast-fed genetically modified corn derivatives. And we know that GMO-corn is a poison.

Interestingly, Cargill was forced to settle a class-action lawsuit last year for labeling Truvia "natural" when it's actually made from a fermentation process whereby yeast is fed GMO corn maltodextrin.

Even CBS heard of this statement that Truvia is an insecticide:

"Erythritol, the main component of the sweetener Truvia, has a new, unexpected application -- it may be used as an insecticide. Researchers found that fruit flies fed with food that included erythritol or the erythritol-containing sweetener Truvia died much sooner than flies fed with food containing other types of sweeteners."

"The more you get [fruit flies] to consume erythritol, the faster they die," Sean O'Donnell, a professor of biology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, told CBS News.

The abstract of the published study concludes, "Here we show that Erythritol, a non-nutritive sugar alcohol, was toxic to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster."

This scary thing is that no other sweetener killed the fruit flies. Indeed, fruit flies were also subjected to feeding tests with sucrose and corn syrup, but those sweeteners didn't kill them.

Erythritol also interfered with the flies' motor coordination, as stated in the study text:

"...adult flies raised on food containing Truvia displayed aberrant motor control prior to death. We, therefore, assayed motor reflex behavior through climbing assays. Flies raised on food containing Truvia showed a significantly decreased ability to climb."

Researchers were also able to determine that stevia was not the cause of the problem. They also tested Purevia and found it was safe for fruit flies.

Only erythritol, the main component of Truvia, replicated the toxic effects on fruit flies.

Erythritol also exhibited a dose-dependent death response, meaning the more that was consumed by the flies, the more quickly they died.

We can see that the FDA does not care about American health. They declared that Truvia is safe for human consumption when in fact, it is not.

Most people believe sugar alcohols are safe to consume, and perhaps they're right, but we do not really know.

The fact that millions of people consume them does not guarantee they are safe. Medications are used by millions of people, but it is the third leading cause of death in the country.

There are questions that we need to answer.

Is there some unknown contaminant sin erythritol that's causing these toxic effects? Or maybe it's the GMO connection?

That could be the answer because most erythritol comes from genetically modified corn.

Is Truvia toxic only to insects? Of perhaps also humans?

We do not know. We have known that insects die once they consume them.

At this moment, from all the evidence we have, I do not recommend Truvia. There are other options for sweeteners like stevia, monk fruit, or natural sugars like honey or coconut sugar.

What about Xylitol?

Xylitol (E-967), a five-carbon polyol obtained by the hydrogenation of D-xylose, is naturally found in fruits, berries, vegetables, oats, and mushrooms, and a small percentage is also produced by the human body. Xylitol is widely used in various pharmaceutical products in addition to sugar-free candies and chewing gums. Xylitol was first synthesized in 1891 and is ～95% as sweet as sucrose.

The effects of intakes of 40 and 200 mg xylitol · kg body weight?1 · d?1 on the composition of gut microbiota and lipid metabolism in mice have been reported.

Xylitol reduced the abundance of fecal Bacteroidetes and Barnesiella and increased the abundance of Firmicutes and Prevotella in mice fed a high-fat diet with medium-dose dietary xylitol. Because xylitol is capable of modifying the gut microbiota in mice, a study compared the fecal microbiome of mice after being fed either a 0.05% isoflavone and 5% xylitol diet or a 0.05% isoflavone-only diet as a control.

The Bacteroides concentration was higher in the control diet than in the xylitol-rich diet. In addition, xylitol ingestion shifted the rodent fecal microbiome population from Gram-negative to Gram-positive bacteria.

In human volunteers, a similar shift occurs after a single 30-g oral dose of xylitol. The effect of soluble low-digestible carbohydrates, including xylitol, on butyrate production and the prebiotic potential of these substances, has been assessed using in vitro human fecal cultures.

L-Sorbose and xylitol cause prebiotic stimulation of the growth and metabolic activity of Anaerostipes spp. in the human colon. The correlation between bacterial translocation with morphologic changes in the intestinal mucosa and shifts of the intestinal microbiota in hamsters with Clostridium difficile infection show that the combination of lactobacilli (probiotic) and xylitol (prebiotic) had a protective effect against C. difficile infection.

To conclude, although some polyols, such as erythritol, sorbitol, and mannitol, do not affect the composition of gut microbiota, moderate doses of polyols could induce shifts in the gut microbiome in healthy people.

The laxative effects of polyols need to be considered when they are consumed by patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

Effects of polyols on gut microbiota composition. Erythritol, sorbitol, and mannitol do not affect the composition of the gut microbiota; however, lactitol, isomaltose, xylitol, and maltitol provoke shifts in the gut microbiome, increasing bifidobacteria numbers in healthy people.

Xylitol reduces the abundance of fecal Bacteroidetes and the genus Barnesiella, increases Firmicutes and the genus Prevotella, and affects C. difficile in mice.

Overall, sugar alcohols appear to be safer than artificial sweeteners with several potentially therapeutic effects. Although the metabolic and weight loss benefits of sugar alcohols haven't been studied as extensively, I would recommend sugar alcohols over artificial sweeteners to anyone who needs a low-calorie sweetener, although I wouldn't recommend that anyone consume huge amounts of them.

I'll also be interested to see additional research on their ability to alter the gut microbiome and disrupt biofilms because this could make sugar alcohols a useful tool for certain patients.

At this point, there don't seem to be any major problems with sugar alcohols, so if it's something you're interested in, I would experiment with your own tolerance and see how they affect you.

However, people with gut issues should be cautious.

God bless y’all ??

Dr. Serge

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