From dietary soft drinks to ice cream without sugar, artificial sweeteners have been promoted as an alternative without guilt to satisfy the taste of sweet. However, new research published in the magazine ‘Cell metabolism‘of reveals that the aspartamoone of the most common sugar substitutes could affect vascular health.
A team of cardiovascular and clinical health researchers has discovered that aspartamo increases insulin levels in animals, which contributes to atherosclerosis, that is, the accumulation of fat plaque in the arteries. This, in turn, generates a greater inflammation and a high risk of heart attacks and long -term stroke.
The investigation was born from an informal conversation during a project meeting. «One of my students drank a sugar soda and asked him: ‘Why don’t you investigate that?’« »Remember the main author, Yihai Cao, specialist in chronic diseases related to vascular disorders in the Karolinska Institute of Sweden.
Previous investigations have associated the consumption of sweeteners with a higher risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular conditions, but specific mechanisms were still not clarified.
For this study, the researchers fed mice with daily doses of 0.15 % aspartamo for 12 weeks, which is equivalent to ingesting approximately three cans of dietary soda per day in humans. Compared to mice that did not consume the sweetener, mice fed with aspartamo developed larger arterial plates and experienced higher levels of inflammation, two key indicators of compromised cardiovascular health.
When analyzing the blood of the mice, the researchers detected a significant increase in insulin levels after aspartame intake. It was not surprising, since our body has receptors to detect sweetness in the mouth, the intestine and other tissues, which regulate the liberation of insulin. However, Aspartamo, which is 200 times sweeter than sugar, seemed to deceive these receptors to release insulin in excess.
The researchers showed that these high insulin levels promoted the growth of fatty plaques in mice arteries, suggesting that insulin could be the key link between aspartamo and cardiovascular health. Subsequently, they explored how insulin increase contributed to the accumulation of plaque and discovered that a Immune signal called CX3CL1 It was activated especially under insulin stimulation.
“Due to the strong blood flow in the arteries, most chemical compounds would be quickly eliminated by heart pumping,” explains Cao. «Surprisingly, Cx3cl1 is not. It remains adhered to the surface of the internal lining of blood vessels and acts as a hook catching immune cells in its path ».
Inflammation
Many of these trapped immune cells are related to the inflammation of blood vessels. However, when the researchers eliminated the CX3CL1 receptors in some immune cells of the mice fed with aspartame, the harmful plaque accumulation did not occur. These results highlight the role of CX3CL1 in the effects of Aspartame on the arteries, according to CAO.
In the future, Cao and his team plan to verify their findings in humans. In addition, it provides that CX3CL1 could become a therapeutic objective for chronic diseases beyond cardiovascular, since vascular inflammation is also involved in conditions such as stroke, arthritis and diabetes.
“Artificial sweeteners are present in almost all types of food, so we must know their long -term health effects,” concludes Cao.
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