Sugar Alcohols Ruined My Health: Learn from My Mistakes (Patreon)

[This is a transcript.]

This is a video about digestive problems. It’s not what I normally talk about, and so I’ve hesitated to make this video. But then I thought. If it helps even one single person to avoid some of the pain and sleepless nights I’ve gone through, it’ll have been worth it. So here we go.

If you regularly suffer from abdominal pain, cramps, bloating, gas, nausea, or diarrhoea, all of this or some, about half an hour to an hour after meals, you don’t know why and you have never heard of sugar alcohols or polyols, then you should watch this video. The rest of you can go. I’m serious. Please leave us sufferers alone while we talk about our intestines, we don’t like feeling watched.

Here's my story. I have for a decade or so suffered from cramps and pain and bloating after every other meal or so and couldn’t figure out why. I have no problem with either lactose or fructose or gluten. I have temporarily cut out all artificial sweeteners but that didn’t make any difference. I have meticulously written down every ingredient of what I’ve eaten and found no common denominator. Sometimes it went away for a few days, then it came back.

I’ve been told by doctors that it’s stress, my women’s things, backpain radiating to the front, magnesium deficiency, my immune system, or that all my inner organs have moved down several inches after the twin pregnancy which they have but so what.

I’ve been told I have diverticulae. I’ve had a colonoscopy and can proudly report to have seen my own colon from the inside. Actually it was more interesting than I thought it’d be, but it turned out I don’t have any diverticulae. I’ve eventually been told I have irritable bowel syndrome which seems to be doctor’s speech for we don’t know what you have, but it’s the only thing left on the list, now please go away.

After a very long time of this, I coincidentally noticed a brand of cookies that suddenly started causing me problems when it previously hadn’t. The only difference was one single ingredient. Sorbitol. When I looked this up, a light bulb went on in my head, and that’s why I am doing this video.

Sorbitol is a sugar alcohol. It’s often added to soft cookies to prevent them from drying out. Sugar alcohol is a somewhat confusing name because it’s neither a sugar nor an alcohol. It’s just that part of the molecule is like that of sugar, and another part like that of alcohol. But sugar alcohols are their own chemical class.

The thing is now that there isn’t one sugar alcohol but like a dozen of them, and they all have different names. There’s sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol, lactitol, and just when you think there’s a rhyme to it, there’s isomalt. And then there are chemicals derived from those, such as sorbitan monostearate and polyoxyethylene sorbitan monopalmitate. And all of these are very common food additives.

This is why I couldn’t figure out what’s causing me problems, because you need a fucking chemistry degree to know what’s in your food.

And just in case that wasn’t already confusing enough, in German the names are somewhat different, Sorbitol for example is just called Sorbit. I’ll leave you a list in the info below, but please don’t assume that it’s complete.

It's now clear to me that I very obviously have an intolerance to sugar alcohols. I say obviously because since I’ve cut them out of my diet, 95 percent of my problems have disappeared and I don’t need a doctor to confirm this causal relation. The remaining issue is probably that sugar alcohols are naturally contained in many fruits and vegetables and it’s really difficult to entirely get rid of them. But the biggest bulk of them comes from food additives.

I’ve probably had this my entire life, which brings up the interesting question why I didn’t notice sooner. The biggest part of the reason is most likely age. Food intolerances are usually threshold effects, that is, you tolerate stuff up to a certain amount. This threshold tends to get lower with age, which is why many people don’t notice until midlife. But I believe that another part of the reason is that sugar alcohols are becoming much more widely used and so the amount we are exposed to is increasing.

In fact when I went through the food products in our household, I found sugar alcohols in like every second one. Everything from marmalade to cake to cookies, cereal bars, gummy bears, candy, dairy products. They’re contained even in dietary supplements, like that magnesium I was told to take. They’re also often added to medication, like these ibuprofen capsules, and they’re contained in nasal sprays and toothpaste.

Ironically you also find sorbitol in drugs that are supposed to relief gas or heartburn. Yes, that’s right. Those pills I’ve been taking to calm down my blubbering guts actually made it worse.

The major reason sugar alcohols now seem to be all over the place is that they taste kind of sweet but have a lower calory value than standard sugar and aren’t as bad for your teeth. This makes them appealing from a health perspective. They also require far less, or no insulin to be metabolized which makes them suitable for diabetics. At the same time they are not technically artificial sweeteners, so they don’t have to be disclosed on food labels. The labels will often just say “less sugar”. Or sometimes, it’ll be called somewhat vaguely a “sugar substitute”.

But most humans can’t properly digest sugar alcohols. The molecules that they’re made up of don’t get split up in the stomach. They should get absorbed in the walls of the intestine. But this absorption is almost always incomplete. And then bacteria will go to work on what remains. This is what causes most of the digestive problems, it’s the bacteria having a feast and producing a lot of gas.

This happens for pretty much everyone, but I guess the effect must be somehow related to the microbiome you happen to have acquired over your lifetime, and chances are if you have an autoimmune problem that’ll flare up along with it.

By the way, a sugar alcohol by name “maltitol syrup” was the major ingredient in the infamous “sugar free” Haribo gummy bears that sent people to the loo very quickly and that led to some hilarious reviews before the gummy bears were taken off the market.

But the global market for sugar alcohols is booming and it’s projected to grow further so I predict that diagnoses of sugar alcohol intolerance are going to skyrocket in the coming decade. In contrast to lactose and fructose intolerance, there isn’t currently any pill you can take that’ll help your body break the stuff down. So other than cutting it out of your diet there isn’t anything you can do. Though maybe somewhere someone is working on a pill that’ll help us actually digest the stuff that’s sold as food these days, wouldn’t that be nice.

As I said earlier, sugar alcohols are also known as polyols and they’re the “P” of the fodmap diet. Which I had come across before but in all honesty, it seemed so cumbersome that I didn’t sincerely think of trying it. So, well, I hope that this helps some of you because frankly I feel rather stupid it took me so long to figure this out.

I want to be clear that most people have little or no problem with sugar alcohols, and I am not saying they’re somehow bad or something. But if you do have digestive problems and you haven’t tried removing sugar alcohols, do give it a try, and you’ll probably know very quickly if that was the cause of the problem. If it was, please let me know in the comments, because it’d make me feel a little less stupid, thank you and see you tomorrow.

antigas

https://www.gas-x.com/gas-relief-products/extra-strength-softgels/

painkillers

https://www.advil.com/our-products/advil-pain/advil-liqui-gels-minis/

chocolate

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cavalier-Chocolatier-Chocolate-Maltitol-Sweeteners/dp/B00DZRCIUA