That sense of reassurance that you won’t gain so much as an ounce from having drank a diet soda or from having put a little artificial sweetener in your coffee might come at a price. Artificial sweeteners might be leaving a mark on your DNA that could ripple through future generations of your family lineage and affect them in ways we don’t yet understand.
A study published in Frontiers in Nutrition by researchers at the University of Chile gave mice sucralose, a common zero-calorie artificial sweetener found in many grocery store items. Think diet sodas, popsicles, barbecue sauces, syrups, cereals, and more. They found that these sucralose mice developed changes in their gut bacteria and that genes closely associated with inflammation were affected. They also noted noticeable changes in metabolic function.
But those changes didn’t stop with those mice. They continued in successive generations. Their offspring, and even their grandchildren, showed similar biological changes despite never having been fed sucralose themselves.
Artificial Sweeteners Could Affect Your DNA for Generations, Study Finds
The study tracked three generations of mice. The first group had either plain water, sucralose, or stevia for 16 weeks. Their descendants were like the kid you knew in school who didn’t eat so much as a single bowl of sugary cereal until college. They were raised without any exposure to sweeteners, so that the researchers could more clearly see what, if anything, was being passed down biologically.
It became immediately clear that the effects of sucralose were being passed down. It affected the gut bacteria of future generations of mice that had never been exposed to sucralose, disrupting their core bacterial communities and reducing levels of short-chain fatty acids, which are compounds linked to healthy metabolism and lower inflammation. The effects of sucralose also activated genes associated with gut inflammation and suppressed a liver gene involved in fat and blood sugar regulation.
Stevia, another artificial sweetener, was also tested. It showed similar effects, but they were milder. The researchers think the difference comes down to how the body processes sweeteners. Sucralose has to pass through the entire digestive system, and it does so largely unchanged, lingering in your gut, messing with your gut bacteria the whole time. Stevia, on the other hand, breaks down more quickly. It doesn’t have as much time to mess with your gut.
Obviously, it’s a mouse study, and something with this is going to be difficult to replicate in humans and may take decades under strictly controlled conditions before we see clear results, but so far the findings are a bit unsettling. The negative effects of that diet soda you have today will show up in your kids and your grandkids. At this rate, all we can do is hope the effects aren’t that bad.
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