 Iolose is a kind of low-calorie sugar naturally existing in very small quantities, but now industrially produced as a commercial sweetener, said to have advantages that make it comparable to erythritol as a sugar substitute. It said to have anti-diabetic effects, but this was in obese mice. Iolose decreases LDL cholesterol levels in high-fat-fed hamsters, and is said to have a substantial impact on obesity in lard-munching mice. But what about men and women? In a Petri dish, Iolose inhibits fat cell precursors from maturing into fat cells and reduced the amount of fat accumulation within fat cells. Here's a before-and-after picture with the fat-standing red of swapping in some Iolose for regular sugar. Therefore, the researchers conclude Iolose may be a promising sugar substitute for an anti-obesity diet, but you don't know until you put it to the test. They gave people about a teaspoon of Iolose a half hour before eating a meal, and compared to the no-sugar control group, the Iolose group started burning more fat. The researchers concluded that Iolose enhances after a meal fat burning, indicating there could be a novel sweetener to control and maintain healthy body weight through enhanced energy metabolism. Okay, but first of all, it was only 15 calories of fat burned over that 4-hour period, and they didn't burn more calories overall. They just switched from burning carb calories to fat calories, and so may have just switched back later on and made up for it later in the day. You can't just look at one meal. You need to track people's actual weight over time, and here we go. A weight-reducing effect of a syrup that included about 5% Iolose compared to high-fructose corn syrup. The results show significant decreases in body weight, body fat, and waste circumference, but it was some proprietary syrup mixture, and look anything would look good against high-fructose corn syrup. This is the study I'd been looking for. Evaluating the effect of Iolose for fat mass reduction in humans, over 100 individuals randomized to a placebo control, sucralose, or a teaspoon of Iolose twice a day, or one in three-quarter teaspoons twice a day. And despite no change in physical activity or calorie consumption between the two groups, body fat was significantly decreased following Iolose supplementation. They even took CT scans so they could tell where the fat was disappearing from. Now, the drop in body fat was only about two pounds over 12 weeks, and the drop in abdominal fat in the high-dose group was almost totally a drop in subcutaneous fat, the flabby superficial fat, not the dangerous visceral fat deeper down that really matters for health. But still, and body fat lost despite no change in calorie intake, similar to what was seen in the mice, but the hamster effect did not materialize no significant change in LDL cholesterol in either of the Iolose groups. What about the purported anti-diabetes effects? If you have people chug a beverage with up to about two teaspoons of Iolose alone, previously known as psychose, or with a big load of rapidly digesting carbs, the Iolose alone has predictably no influence on blood glucose or insulin concentrations, yet when you consume Iolose along with the refined carbs, there is actually a suppression of the elevation of blood sugar and insulin, and by a significant amount, a 30% drop in blood sugar and insulin levels over a two-hour period. We think it's because the presence of Iolose impairs the absorption of sugar through the intestinal lining, because they all might be competing for the same sugar transporter. Yeah, but who's chugging maltodextrin? What about just like a regular meal? And here we go. And in borderline diabetics, who could use some blood sugar spike suppression, a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled crossover experiment to see what drinking one and a quarter teaspoon of Iolose in a cup of tea with a meal would do, and indeed a significant drop. It's only about 15%. You can see how they tried to exaggerate the y-axis. They also did a second experiment, randomized people to a little over a teaspoon of Iolose three times a day with meals for 12 weeks. Nice to see there didn't appear to be any adverse side effects, but they also didn't find any weight loss effects in contrast with that other study. So the body fat data is mixed, and so too is the sugar data. This study found no effects of Iolose on blood sugars and healthy participants, though a similar study on diabetics did. Systematic review and meta-analyses of all such controlled feeding trials suggest that the acute benefits on blood sugars was of borderline significance, and it's unclear whether or not this loan could translate into meaningful improvements in blood sugar control over time. So maybe it's not enough to just add Iolose, you might actually have to also cut out the junk. Although the ability to suppress blood sugar responses is one of the most well-studied aspects of Iolose, I do just want to cover one last angle. The fact that Iolose extends the lifespan of a tiny roundworm called C. elegans through a dietary restriction mechanism, even though they ate the same amount of food. Two months in, just a few percent of the control group were still alive, whereas twice as many in the low Iolose group and about 25% still around in the higher Iolose group. We think it worked boosting the expression and activities of antioxidant enzymes in the body, extending lifespan by mopping up free radicals. Who cares about the survival curves of worms? Well, C. elegans is a well-studied model of aging and longevity, but mostly just for convenience sake, but does share most of the longevity genes or pathways we're interested in. Be nice to see experiments on at least human cells, and here we go. The effect of Iolose on free radicals and oxidative stress in human coronary artery and bothelial cells, the cells that line the inside of our arteries, add a bunch of sugar, and free radical levels shoot up, but add the same amount of sugar along with some Iolose, and it says if you never even added the sugar. And this then translates to inhibiting the expression of an inflammatory marker that plays a role in the build-up of atherosclerotic plaque. However, it's still too early to draw conclusions about the clinical relevance of these data. To conclude, are these rare sugars like Iolose healthy alternatives for traditional sweeteners? Well, considering the variety of potentially beneficial effects of Iolose, without known disadvantages from metabolic and toxicological studies, Iolose may currently be the most promising rare sugar. But how much is that saying? We just don't have a lot of good human data. As a result of the absence of these studies, it may be too early to recommend rare sugars for human consumption.