According to recent media coverage of a recent “study,” eating erythritol can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke. 

While the headlines about this “study” were sensational and scary (like other hit pieces), it’s really just another assault on healthy choices – this time an alternative sweetener that can help people lose weight, get healthier, and therefore reduce their chances of heart attacks and strokes.

There were several major facts omitted from all the sensational media coverage and from the “study” itself:

1. People make erythritol in their own bodies. Thanks to something called the pentose phosphate pathway, obese and other metabolically unhealthy people convert glucose and fructose into erythritol, which, of course, raises their blood levels of erythritol. 
2. Obese and other metabolically unhealthy people who eat lots of glucose and fructose also have the highest rates of heart attack and stroke.
3. The “study” didn’t even bother to ask the subjects if they ate erythritol, yet the article title implied the cause was the food version (exogenous), with no mention of the self-manufactured (endogenous) version, nor any differentiation between the two.

BUT, they knew people like me would be chiming in, who knows how the body works, AND how to read scientific studies, AND how to discern which studies are total garbage (or agenda-driven propaganda). 

So, to preempt criticism from people like me, the “study” authors added another teensy weensy ultra-short, sub-segment “study” of 8 people and fed them 30 grams of erythritol for 7 days, and low and behold, that huge amount did, of course, raise their blood levels, which then helped them project the false impression that dietary erythritol was the culprit. 

Remember how the main study didn’t even ask the subjects whether they ate it or not? Yeah, and that’s the study they got their data from. But based on their separate micro “study,” we are to infer assumptions into the larger study that aren’t there. 

Yes, this is how they manipulate you. They do think you are that stupid or believe they are that tricky, but in either case, it’s clear and blatant deception. 

This is also “correlation does not imply causation” in its most basic form, which is junk science, so everyone in the media who villainized erythritol based on this hit piece bogus “study” should be ashamed of themselves – and especially the authors who chose their misleading study title, knowing that would trigger the idiot media to jump in and run with it.

So what does this all mean? The bottom line is, erythritol doesn’t cause heart disease or stroke. Erythritol in the bloodstream is a symptom of a metabolically unhealthy person who eats too many fast carbs and sugar and it’s the being metabolically unhealthy part that is killing them!

In fact, eating more foods sweetened with erythritol (stevia and monkfruit are great too) instead of all the sugar and starchy foods would help those metabolically unhealthy people turn their health around and be less likely to die from a heart attack or stroke.

So once again, doing the opposite of what the media says is usually the better choice…

References (also linked above):

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1620079114

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02223-9

3/7 update: