Study reveals impact of artificial sweeteners on the environment

Scientific research has well established the human body’s inability to break down sucralose, an artificial sweetener found in many zero-calorie foods and beverages. The compound is so stable that it escapes wastewater treatment and is found in drinking water and the aquatic environment.

“We can’t break down sucralose, and a lot of microorganisms can’t break it down either, because it’s a really tough molecule that doesn’t break down easily. So there are a lot of questions about how it affects the environment.” and whether it’s something that could affect our microbial communities,” said Tracey Schafer, assistant scientist at the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Life Sciences and the Department of Soil, Water and Ecosystem Sciences, part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences .

Schafer co-authored a recently published study demonstrating how sucralose affects the behavior of cyanobacteria—aquatic photosynthetic bacteria—and diatoms, microscopic algae that make up more than 30% of primary food production in the marine food chain. The work is published in a journal Environmental monitoring and assessment.

Researchers collected soil and water from freshwater and brackish water at Marineland in Florida. Back in his lab St. Augustine exposed samples to different concentrations of sucralose and measured photosynthesis and microbial respiration in two separate time studies: every four to six hours over one day and every 24 hours over five days.

Compared to the control group, the concentration of freshwater cyanobacteria increased when the samples were exposed to sucralose, but the concentration of brackish cyanobacteria increased and then decreased with dosing.

“There is the potential that freshwater communities can mistake sucralose for a nutrient, 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 undergraduate degree. in chemistry.

Both freshwater and brackish diatoms exposed to sucralose showed an overall decreasing trend in population compared to the control group. However, the difference between the dosed samples and the control group was most profound in the freshwater experiments.

Sucralose’s ability to both increase and decrease populations of microbial communities could potentially threaten a naturally balanced ecosystem, Westmoreland said.

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

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

“I think this study was a good first step to start looking at how sucralose might affect our aquatic communities and hopefully move more research forward,” Schafer said.