 Preveyors of erythritol like to talk about how this low-calorie sweetener is a natural constituent of foods like melons and peaches, but it's in such tiny amounts— the average person only gets like 25 milligrams— and now that it's manufactured commercially, intake could easily be a thousand times that. I've done a few videos about it. What's the update? Well, here's a paper with a twist. Erythritol, a non-nutritive sugar-alcohol sweetener and the main component of Truvia brand sweetener, is a palatable, ingested insecticide. Huh? Yeah, they found it. Killed fruit flies. And so they suggested we start using erythritol as a safe, sustainable approach for pest control. It evidently induces in flies lethal regurgitation. Also kills the yellow fever mosquito, termites, and ants. So why isn't erythritol sprayed on crops? Because it hurts the crops too, and the dose is needed to kill insects that has damaging effects on the plants. But hey, if it hurts plants, maybe we can use it as an herbicide too. Okay, but what about just as a human sweetener? We've long known that the bacteria that produce dental plaque on teeth aren't fueled by erythritol, and they can't seem to make acid out of it, either to cause cavities. As long as plaque stays above a pH of 5.7, food is safe for teeth, and swish with some erythritol, and nothing happens, whereas then swish with some table sugar, and pH dips down to the danger zone. But xylitol, a sugar outcrop similar to erythritol, isn't just dentally safe in terms of not causing cavities, but may actually have an active cavity-stopping benefit. See, dental cavities are reversible if detected and treated sufficiently early. Early on we thought that cavity reduction found in xylitol studies, where people chewed on xylitol gum or sucked on xylitol candies, may have just been due to indirect effects, like getting your saliva going. Or hey, every xylitol candy may be one less sugar candy, so maybe it's just a substitution effect. Can you imagine how you might design a study to test if there were direct xylitol effects? I'll give you a moment to pause, and try to come up with something. How about secretly randomizing people to use xylitol-containing toothpaste? And indeed, boom, a reduction in tooth decay compared to the control toothpaste without the xylitol. So xylitol really does seem to have cavity-reducing effects. What about erythritol then? All studies strongly support the idea of erythritol as being cavity-reducing, too, perhaps even more so than xylitol. For example, more than twice the drop in the amount of plaque after six months sucking on erythritol candies versus xylitol. In fact, that extends out at least three years. Yeah, but did that actually translate into fewer cavities? We have all these studies pointing in that direction, however no long-term human cavity trials on erythritol have been completed. Until now, a double-blind or randomized controlled trial involving hundreds of schoolchildren sucking on four erythritol, xylitol, or control candies three times per school day, and a erythritol won the day. Significantly lower number of cavity-ridden teeth and surfaces were found in the erythritol group. Another advantage to erythritol is safety to dogs. Doses of xylitol, as little as a half teaspoon and a 30-pound dog, can be life-threatening, whereas erythritol is so well tolerated with no adverse effects reported upwards of, like, more than a cup a day, suggesting it could even be used as like an ingredient in chew toys or something.