September 19th, 2023

Coach Sophie

I wanted to share a bit on something I recently encountered and how I processed that information as a coach and as an individual!

Have you ever seen a headline in the news about a food ingredient that is now considered toxic or damaging to your health? I recently saw a post in major news journals about a sugar alcohol called erythritol headlined to be causing strokes and heart disease in consumers. As someone who consumes erythritol from time to time in baked goods, my first thought was concern. I have grace for myself though since the headline is quite literally written to elicit that response from the reader! It’s a classic psychological phenomenon of creating confusion and even fear around specific foods. Even when an article like that is quoting real studies (and even especially in those cases), it’s important to take a deeper look at what the data says, how the study was conducted, and knowing you can check with your coach if you have questions!

The first thing I want to mention is that some of the headlines are accurate to the studies! For example, added sugars have been shown repeatedly to cause dysbiosis in the gut, hormonal issues, even impact mental health, so headlines about added sugars causing issues tend to be backed with solid data. The first thing I do when I see concerning studies come to light is to look for a meta-analyses of the studies carried out on that food/diet/ingredient/lifestyle habit/etc. A meta-analysis ensures an increased level of validity to a claim as it pools together multiple years of data and studies to account for inconsistencies and errors that are hard to avoid with individual studies. Once I look at the meta-analysis, I look at who was included in those studies (i.e. were they studying healthy individuals, people with blood pressure issues, pre-existing conditions) to determine if those studies are even applicable to my clients or myself. Then, I look at the statistical significance of conclusive results to determine whether those results are personally relevant to my clients or myself. If there isn’t a meta-analysis available, I will still look at those individual studies to see first if the population studied is relevant and if results appear significant.

The tricky part about news articles with bold headlines around a food being bad is that, sometimes, people in the industry might profit in some way off headlines like these so it’s important to look at an aggregate of reputable professional and clinical opinions too for unbiased and factual information.

And just to wrap it up with that erythritol study specifically, that study observationally studied people who were already at higher risk for heart disease and stroke. Moreover, the erythritol mentioned in the study was found as an accidental correlation of what was likely endogenous erythritol (produced by the body not consumed through external products). The study also didn’t look at dietary patterns of people studied, nor did it look at the effect of erythritol in healthy individuals (i.e. there was no control group to compare to). The study results most likely indicate that the people studied already had dysregulated metabolisms and that erythritol being high in the blood was an effect of that rather than the misrepresented cause of the diseases as indicated by headlines. Many clinicians and scientists agree that this particular study did not provide data to support the claims that erythritol could be dangerous to ingest or in any way causal to heart health issues. So no need to fear with this scary headline! As always, if you ever see something in the nutrition and fitness news that is raising questions for you, feel free to ask your coach for recommendations on that topic