anti-aging and flawed studies

The Dr. Ben Interview is Now Available. And Some News About Erythritol.

It’s been a busy week in the keto world, folks. Two studies came out that made a big splash in the news, and I’ve been getting all kinds of questions about them. I’ll get to those in a minute.

But first, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to all the folks who joined our live Zoom session with Dr. Ben Bocchicchio last week. As always, Dr. Ben dropped some madd knowledge about exercise, anti-aging, supplements, and more.

If you missed it, I’ve posted the interview on all the best platforms. You can check out the video on YouTube, or if you prefer audio-only, you can find it on my Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and others.

Now about those studies…

fake sugar, real problems?

Nutrition Twitter lost its mind last week when a study showed up in every major news outlet connecting erythritol, a common, no-calorie sweetener, to heart attacks and strokes. It’s called a sugar alcohol, and because it’s not digested in the same way that real sugar is, it’s considered zero-carb in many ketogenic diet plans, and it’s found in many “keto”-labeled candies, cakes, cookies and the like. (Fun aside: it’s also a laxative, when taken in large quantities. So be careful not to overdo it on those treats. #disasterpants)

Yosemite Sam’s Biscuits are Burning. Photo Credit: “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Warner Bros.

So if there is convincing evidence that erythritol causes cardiovascular disease, it would be a major blow to the keto community. The operative word here, however, is “convincing.”

The best analysis I’ve seen of the study was from Peter Attia, MD, in his newsletter. Among the problems that he identifies, Attia points out that erythritol is a compound found in the body naturally, not just ingested in our food. So there’s no way of knowing whether the high levels of erythritol found in the blood of these heart-attack and stroke patients came from food or were there already — and unfortunately, the researchers didn’t ask these folks about their diet.

This is the old case of Correlation v. Causation, and a variety that Attia calls the “third variable problem.”

It’s an idea I often present to my students: High schoolers who live in houses with two or more bathrooms perform better on the SAT than those who live in a house with one bathroom. How could this be?

Students venture all kinds of guesses — maybe the kids are able to put in more study time because they don’t have to spend all day waiting for their sister to finish drying her hair. Usually someone gets it eventually. More bathrooms means a bigger house. A bigger house means more wealth. More wealth means money for tutors, prep classes, and so on. The third variable in this case is money.

Back to erythritol: could it be that something else is going on in the body that causes both high levels of erythritol and higher risk of cardiovascular disease? A third variable? We have no way of knowing.

You can read the whole article here, or you can skip to the end, where his conclusions include the following:

“Another flawed paper, another spray of alarming headlines, another rush by the scientific community to set the record straight before panic spreads.”

“Far from condemning erythritol as an ingredient in foods and beverages, these data provide no insight whatsoever on the effects of dietary erythritol intake.”

“As I see it, you’re more likely to get a heart attack from the fearmongering surrounding this study than from erythritol itself.”

Another study came out, right on the heels of this one, extolling the dangers of a “keto-like diet” (whatever that is). I’ll address that one next week, but from what I’ve seen so far, it’s even more flawed than the study above. In the meantime, please enjoy my chat with Dr. Ben, and if you’d like to see me continue this little book-of-the-month experiment, leave a comment or shoot me an email reply. I’d love to hear from you!