Sounds like aspartame (my artificial sweetener of choice) seems to still be basically without side effect besides gut biome changes. Which doesn’t really mean anything currently because they don’t know if that has any measurable change in the body overall.
Take this with a grain of aspartame, but I was also very gung ho on artificial sweetners and swept all the fear mongering in with gluten and msg. Aka bullshit. For years, I was drinking tons of diet soda. Maybe 2L per day of diet root beer.
For whatever reason, 4 years ago, I became super sensitive to aspartame. It would make me hyperalert like a more subtle version of caffeine. I had insmonia for random days. It took me forever to isolate it to aspartame, since I've never had a problem, nor suspected there could even be a problem. I don't have pku but it is what it is. Sucralose, stevia, regular sugar still fine. Bodies are weird. I still believe in science but the older I get, the more I give credence that in some people things just work differently. I don't just jump to the conclusion that they're making something up just because official scienctific papers say it's 99.999% safe.
I drank a lot of Coca-Cola life (the one with stevia) and thought that I may have found a drink with a good-enough taste/sugar balance for me. Then, from one day to the other, I got absolutely disgusted by one part of the drink's taste, most probably the sweetener. I could not drink a single glass anymore and today when I even think about Coca-Cola life, it sends me a shiver down the spline. I can drink infinite quantities of drinks made with cheap sugar-free lemonade sirup, so other sweeteners seem to be fine for me, but not stevia.
Stevia when used on it's own as a sweetener leaves a bad after taste of bitterness. It's better be used in combination with another sweetener or sugar (just to decrease the amount of regular sugar in a product). Most products advertised containing stevia usually include an additional sweetener if you pay attention at the ingredients list.
Totally agree, I can't drink anything with Stevia. I can taste it immediately. My father in law thinks it's the greatest thing ever, doesn't bother him at all. Go figure.
Fascinating. It's like your body gradually figured out that you were trying to fool it, and revolted.
I'd bet there are digestion processes that "start up" in response to taste. Maybe your body detected that stevia was regularly "starting up" one of these processes and then withholding the expected glucose spike, and got upset about the pattern
I think that was some of the findings in the linked research. Certain artificial sugars were changing insulin response in subjects. I'm just a sample size of 1, and they're a sample size of 100 but I think it's clear that the beliefe that ALL the artificial sugars are inert and pass right through us is false... sometimes.
Phenethylamine itself becomes N-Methylphenethylamine, not at all dissimilar to its structural isomer, A-Methylphenethylamine, better known as amphetamine.
How much phenylalanine is metabolized into each of these is complicated and depends on a lot of things, but sounds like you did something to cause it to be more.
whaaaaat? Dude you're blowing my mind. I remember diving deep on PKU to see if maybe I had that. I think I remember "clearing" myself by checking 23and me and I didn't have the bad genes? I also eat plenty of phenylalanine so I don't think I have issues with that per se, but maybe like you said, one of the other metabolites is being wonky in me. Thanks so much for the info, I'm gonna read into this more
how could microbiome changes not have measurable impact on the body? bodies are ridiculously complex systems.
and there are plenty of instancess where gut microbiome changes are known to be impactful. my partner got SIBO which caused lots of problems for a few months and she was basically unable to eat anything.
