Research paper
Suez J, Korem T, Zeevi D, Zilberman-Schapira G, Thaiss CA, Maza O, Israeli D, Zmora N, Gilad S, Weinberger A, Kuperman Y, Harmelin A, Kolodkin-Gal I, Shapiro H, Halpern Z, Segal E, Elinav E. Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota. Nature. 2014 Oct 9;514(7521):181-186. doi:10.1038/nature13793. PMCID: PMC4615743.
Why we cite it
Landmark Nature paper establishing in mice that artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance through gut microbiome alterations rather than direct metabolic effects. The species boundary is the whole of what this record must carry: the causal chain is mouse work, and the human evidence is weaker in kind. The study’s strength lies in its multi-layered causation evidence: antibiotic treatment abrogated the effect, fecal transplant transferred it, and host-free anaerobic cultures replicated it. The human intervention arm and observational cohort (n=381) bridge mouse findings to human relevance, while the responder/non-responder split introduces individual microbiome susceptibility. This is the foundational paper for kas02 (sweetener-microbiome knowledge).