Sweeteners are controversial in the nutrition world, but new research suggests that one might have health benefits.
Thaumatin is a natural sweetener derived from a West African fruit called katemfe, that tastes 2,000 times sweeter than table sugar, and is used to enhance the flavor of some processed foods.
"Our research helps to elucidate the health effects of the plant protein, which is widely used as a sweetener," said Veronika Somoza, head of the study and director of the Leibniz Institute, in a statement.
In general, sweeteners can be beneficial for people with a sweet tooth who want to reduce their sugar intake, particularly if they want to avoid gaining weight or developing type 2 diabetes, or if they already have a problem with processing sugar such as diabetes.
However, some nutrition experts have warned that sweeteners might be detrimental to health, perhaps leading to damage in the gut or increasing the risk of insulin resistance—which can lead to diabetes.
This is because, they say, the body recognizes sweetness and responds as if there's sugar, so eating sweeteners may affect insulin responses—the hormone that deals with sugar. Also, sweeteners may encourage people to crave sweet-tasting foods, with negative implications for the diet.
But research from the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, has found that thaumatin might have beneficial effects on digestion.
The team had been researching how bitter-tasting foods influenced digestion in the stomach.
In earlier studies, they had found that certain bitter substances—include protein fragments called peptides—interacted with taste receptors in the stomach to stimulate acid production and increase digestion.
"However, not only bitter tasting substances, but also the health effects of sweeteners are always in the focus on public interest," said Phil Richter, the first author of the study, in a statement.
"Based on our earlier findings, we therefore investigated whether bitter tasting peptides are also formed from the sweet tasting protein thaumatin in the stomach, which could have a physiological effect."
They tested thaumatin on pigs and on human stomach cells in a lab, and found that three bitter peptides were produced during the digestion of thaumatin in the stomach, with a similar effect in the stomach to eating bitter foods—namely, increasing stomach acid production.
The nutrition scientists then tested the effect these peptides had on inflammation in the stomach, by adding Helicobacter pylori.
H. pylori is a strain of bacteria that can cause inflammatory stomach and intestinal diseases, and stomach cancer, if it grows too much in the gut.
Around half the global population has H. pylori living inside them, and it's not necessarily a problem if it's a small part of an otherwise healthy community of gut bacteria in the large intestine.
But H. pylori is able to survive in extremely acidic environments, including in the stomach, and when it was added to the scientists' pretend stomach, it caused the release of pro-inflammatory proteins called interleukin 17A.
Levels of interleukin 17A reduced—indicating less inflammation—when the scientists added one of the bitter peptides that had been released by the stomach during thaumatin digestion.
"It is interesting that we were able to reduce the induced interleukin release of the gastric cells by up to 89.7 percent by adding one of the identified bitter tasting peptides," said Richter.
This suggests that the sweetener thaumatin may have an anti-inflammatory effect in the stomach, which could have wide-reaching benefits for health—if it is researched further.
"The peptide concentrations tested in our study are based on realistic concentrations that can be achieved in the stomach by eating a commercially available sweetener tablet," said Somoza.
"Therefore, our results suggest that the anti-inflammatory potential of thaumatin...should be further investigated.
"Our aim is to better understand the molecular mechanisms of diet-related inflammatory gastric diseases, not least with regard to infections with Helicobacter pylori."
This study was published in scientific journal Food Chemistry.
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Reference
Richter, P., Sebald, K., Fischer, K., Schnieke, A., Jlilati, M., Mittermeier-Klessinger, V., Somoza, V. (2024). Gastric digestion of the sweet-tasting plant protein thaumatin releases bitter peptides that reduce H. pylori-induced pro-inflammatory IL-17A release via the TAS2R16 bitter taste receptor, Food Chem 448, 139157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2024.139157
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