 Arithritol is a sugar alcohol naturally found in small quantities in certain fruits and vegetables, now produced in mass quantities commercially for use as a sweetener. It's about 70% as sweet as table sugar. Previously, it talked about its role in actively preventing tooth decay. It's reported to be totally safe, with almost no calories, and as a bonus, it's less laxative. That's always a good selling point. Arithritol is the highest digestive tolerance of all the sugar alcohols, but how much is that really saying? I've talked about the case report of the air stewardess with puzzling diarrhea, found to be not so puzzling given how much sorbitol containing sugar-free gum she was chewing. Sorbitol has also been implicated in Halloween diarrhea, where people eat one too many sugar-free candies. Arithritol, however, is said to be well tolerated, even up to 80 grams if it's spread out throughout the day, which is like 19 teaspoons, with a sugar equivalent of what you find in like a 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew. In terms of a single dose, though, the average weight man in the U.S. could get away with 14 teaspoons of arithritol at a time and the average weight woman, 15 teaspoons. Children do not appear to be more sensitive on a per-weight basis, but basically there's so much lighter, the maximum dose would be more like 3 or 4 teaspoons at a time. Since above that, you start seeing diarrhea and or severe gastrointestinal symptoms. And while adults may get away with downing like a quarter cup at a time, that's based on when they started having the runs. If you don't want to have any symptoms, you'd want to stick to under about 3 tablespoons at a time, since once you hit 4, it can make you nauseated and give you borbarygmy, a fancy medical term for rumbling in your tummy. Arithritol is also purported to have antioxidant properties, I did a video about the paper that first discovered it, but that was just demonstrating it in a test tube. Does it actually make a difference? Arithritol appears to have endothelial protective effects, meaning protecting the cells that line our arteries. Under normal blood sugar conditions, little effect, but stressed them out in a petri dish with high blood sugars, and arithritol protected human endothelial cells. Under normal blood sugars, few endothelial cells were dying off, but under high blood sugar, cell death shoots up. But add some arithritol at that same high blood sugar level, and death comes back down. Arithritol attenuates cell death induced by diabetic stressors. The researchers conclude that arithritol may have a therapeutically important protective effect on endothelial cells, but you don't know until you put it to the test. Effects of arithritol on endothelial function in patients with type 2 diabetes. And arithritol consumption acutely improved small vessel endothelial function and chronically reduced major artery stiffness. The researchers conclude that the beneficial effects of arithritol may be clinically relevant if confirmed in a controlled study. Wait, it wasn't controlled? No, so you don't know if it would have just happened anyway. So, validation of these findings will require a randomized placebo-controlled study, which should be easy to do, since there's lots of things you could secretly swap in for the arithritol, and no one would know. Hasn't been done yet, but things were looking pretty good for arithritol. And then, arithritol is associated with body fat gain in young adults? What? Arithritol is a predictive biomarker for metabolic dysfunction? Significantly associated with getting diabetes? Significantly associated with getting coronary heart disease? What is going on? We will find out. Next.