Ordinary table salt and most other essential non-organic mineral naturally found in healthy foods, are toxic in increasing doses to bacteria. As a biochemist I'd be willing to bet that those necessary minerals in the human diet would stress the hell out of these bacteria in increasing doses also. The bacteria in this paper do NOT show growth inhibition with these artificial sweeteners in the doses used.
It's a pretty huge jump in scientific presumption - from a change in fluorescence in a contrived sub-inhibitory bacterial "stress" assay, to the authors statement of "we may speculate that the response observed in our study may be relevant to gut microbiome and thus may influence human health". (statements in italics not tested by authors)
Not only that, they were only using a fluorescing E. coli as a proxy for the incredibly diverse gut microbiota. For it to have any real bearing on human health, they'd need to do at least an animal model study and show a difference in 16s rRNA quantitation and/or sequencing for relative abundances of different species. But I sympathize with the need to make your study sound significant and worth doing....
Ordinary table salt and most other essential non-organic mineral naturally found in healthy foods, are toxic in increasing doses to bacteria. As a biochemist I'd be willing to bet that those necessary minerals in the human diet would stress the hell out of these bacteria in increasing doses also. The bacteria in this paper do NOT show growth inhibition with these artificial sweeteners in the doses used.
It's a pretty huge jump in scientific presumption - from a change in fluorescence in a contrived sub-inhibitory bacterial "stress" assay, to the authors statement of "we may speculate that the response observed in our study may be relevant to gut microbiome and thus may influence human health". (statements in italics not tested by authors)
So doubt their basic premise has any validity.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9ki9nw/scientists_...
Not only that, they were only using a fluorescing E. coli as a proxy for the incredibly diverse gut microbiota. For it to have any real bearing on human health, they'd need to do at least an animal model study and show a difference in 16s rRNA quantitation and/or sequencing for relative abundances of different species. But I sympathize with the need to make your study sound significant and worth doing....