Study reveals environmental impact of artificial sweeteners

The human body’s inability to break down sucralose, an artificial sweetener found in many zero-calorie food products and beverages, is well established by scientific research. The compound is so stable that it escapes wastewater treatment and is found in drinking water and aquatic environments.

“We can’t break down sucralose, and a lot of microorganisms can’t break it down because it’s a really strong molecule that doesn’t degrade easily. So there’s a lot of questions about how it’s affecting the environment. And whether it’s something that can affect communities. our microbial,” said Tracey Schafer, an assistant research scientist for the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Biosciences and the department of soil, water and ecosystem sciences, part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Schafer is a co-author of a recently published study that demonstrates how sucralose affects the behavior of cyanobacteria — an aquatic photosynthetic bacterium — and diatoms, microscopic algae that make up more than 30% of primary food production in the marine food chain. The paper was published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment.

The researchers collected soil and water from a freshwater area and a brackish water area in Marineland, Florida. In their St. Augustine lab, they exposed samples to different concentrations of sucralose and measured photosynthesis and microbial respiration in two separate time studies: every four to six hours over a single day and every 24 hours over five days.

Compared to a control group, the concentration of freshwater cyanobacteria increased when the samples were exposed to sucralose, but the concentration of brackish cyanobacteria increased and then fell when dosed.

“The possibility exists that freshwater communities may mistake sucralose for a nutrient, for a sugar that they can use as food,” said Amelia Westmoreland, the study’s lead author and a research scientist who worked on the project while completing her Ph.D. university. in chemistry.

Both freshwater and brackish diatoms exposed to sucralose showed a general downward trend in the population compared to a control group. The difference between the dosed samples and the control group was more profound, however, in the freshwater experiments.

Sucralose’s ability to increase and decrease the population of the microbial community could potentially threaten a naturally balanced ecosystem, Westmoreland said.

“Extreme examples of how this can happen is that the diatom community can disappear, and the other extreme is that this community can completely overtake everything else,” she said.

Both Schafer and Westmoreland said more research is needed to fully understand sucralose and its impact on aquatic environments.

“I think this study was a good first step in looking at how sucralose might affect our aquatic communities, and I hope it will lead to more research going forward,” Schafer said.