Replacing sugar with the natural sweetener erythritol as an alternative for artificial sweeteners: satiating and rewarding without calories?

Food intake is regulated by an intricate communication system between the gut and the brain. Hunger/satiety hormones released from the gut convey information on nutritional status of the body to homeostatic brain circuits sensing energy balance, but also influence reward system responses to food, hence its subjective pleasantness. Sweet is an innately attractive taste to humans because of the caloric value of carbohydrates, but sugar consumption is an important contributor to the obesity epidemic. Therefore, replacing sugar with artificial non-caloric sweeteners (NCS) has been proposed to reduce caloric intake and body weight. However, NCS may lack the satiating and rewarding properties of sugar because of their inability to influence the release of hunger/satiety hormones (in addition to lack of calories). The non-caloric natural sweetener erythritol may be an ideal alternative substitute for sugar, since we recently showed that it increases satiety hormone levels. Therefore, our aim is to study the effects of replacing sugar with erythritol (versus the artificial sweetener sucralose) on food intake regulation in healthy humans, and identify the (hormonal) gut-brain communication and brain mechanisms underlying these effects. This will generate much-needed mechanistic-physiological knowledge, a necessary first step towards developing novel strategies for weight loss management and obesity prevention, and the role of NCS in general, and erythritol in particular, herein.