Effect of artificial sweeteners on insulin resistance among type-2 diabetes mellitus patients

Introduction: Incidence of diabetes mellitus has increased over the past few years, mainly due to our eating habits and physical inactivity. This also includes the use of artificial sweetening agents which have broadly replaced other forms of sugars and have shown a paradoxical, negative effect on blood glucose. Ingestion of these artificial sweeteners (AS) results in the release of insulin from pancreas which is mistaken for glucose (due to their sweet taste). This increases the levels of insulin in blood eventually leading to decreased receptor activity due to insulin resistance. Methodology: It is a crosssectional study that was conducted on patients diagnosed with type-2 diabetes mellitus of a tertiary care hospital in Central India. All the diabetics that presented in the OPD were divided into 2 groups based on whether they use AS (group A) or not (group B). Insulin resistance was calculated for each group using HOMA-IR and graphs were plotted. Results: The HOMAIR values for Group A and B ranged from 0.9-24.33 and 0.12-10.83 with mean values 7.39 and 2.6, respectively, showing that the ones who used AS had a higher insulin resistance. The study also showed that the duration of use of artificial sweeteners had a direct impact on insulin resistance.