Sugar has been getting a bad rap from the health people. It seems to be the main contributor in the chain of events that lead people to become obese - and then go on to develop diabetes. It is an addictive substance and it made fortunes when earlier explorers found the islands of the Caribbean and the sugar cane plant, and introduced slave labour to bring this new luxury to the dinner tables of Europe.
Many people have reduced their use of sugar and replaced it with artificial sweeteners, but it is hard to measure because it is present in much of the food we consume. When "fat "became the nutritional enemy, food manufacturers quickly replaced fat but found their product lacked "taste " - and quickly restored that balance by increasing the sugar content. A can of fizzy drink usually contains the daily sugar amount a healthy adult should consume.
Now it seems that the medical world is having second thoughts about the wisdom of using artificial sweeteners - and there have been suggestions that they cause some people to actually gain weight. Aspartane - as the basic chemical is called - is not directly bad for people but it can have a wide spectrum of differing reactions with the zillions of tiny microbes that live in people's guts, and this is opening up a very interesting new field of medical science.
It was a long held theory that human gut microbes would be consistent across the human spectrum, and that is proving to be false. What we eat and drink and the conditions in which we live seem to make the contents of our intestines very much a microbial mix that is as much a personal identification as our DNA or fingerprints. It is quite possible that if we have the wrong mix the reaction to Saccharin can increase rather than reduce our weight.
Just as the Glucose or Sucrose that we know as sugar causes the human body to extract energy and is spread across the wide food chain, Aspartane is similarly represented in everything from tooth paste to hiding the unpleasant taste of pain killing medicine. It is virtually impossible to banish either sweetener from a person's diet.
Experiments with mice have shown that rebalancing the microbes in the human gut can restore the conditions that cause the lack of some microbes to cause us unpleasant reactions. It seems that gaining an understanding of what microbes should ideally be present in the human gut is fast becoming a new branch of medical science. Unpleasant as it sounds, it has been found that transferring faecal matter from a healthy gut to one lacking balance quickly results in the missing microbes recolonising the new host - and restoring gut equilibrium.
This seems more than just an interesting theory. There must be very few people who have not from time to time developed some ailment that has resulted in them being prescribed an antibiotic. The aim of this substance is to kill the specific bug that is causing ill health - but at the same time it also decimates the entire structure of microbes - both good and bad - that live in our gut.
That presents an entirely rational explanation of why - in the aftermath of having treated some ailment with an antibiotic - we find that there is a new and puzzling change to our health that was not present previously. Having wiped out the entire gut spectrum in our body we have undergone a new process of restoration and the prevailing conditions have delivered an entirely new mix. Our body is learning to live with a new microbe family - with consequent change.
Hopefully, the future may see more of a medical focus on evaluating just what microbe mix is present in each human, and creating the optimum balance to deliver good health. In the interim, the choice between sugar or artificial sweeteners - seems to be in the lap of the Gods !
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