1. Introduction
obesity
OBESITY, INFLAMMATION
These authors contributed equally to this work.Background: Non-nutritive sweeteners (NNS) are part of personalized nutrition strategies supporting healthy glycemic control. In contrast, the consumption of non-nutritive sweeteners has been related to person-specific and microbiome-dependent glycemic impairments. Reports on the effects of NNS on our highly individual cellular immune system are sparse. The recent identification of taste receptor expression in a variety of immune cells, however, suggested their immune-modulatory relevance. Methods: We studied the influence of a beverage-typical NNS system on the transcriptional profiling of sweetener-cognate taste receptors, selected cytokines and their receptors, and on CaDue to the high processing of food and its omnipresence, today’s nutrition contains an increasing number of compounds. As an example, the obesity pandemic might, in part, be caused by a continuously increasing use of added sugars and sweeteners in daily nutrition [Non-nutritive sweeteners via their cognate taste receptors were recently shown also to modulate our cellular immune system [An early review from 1980 concluded that aspartame had no impact on inflammation, at least in animal models [Cyclamate is banned in North America [Beyond the chemical sense of taste, however, there is a need for more information on the bioavailability and common plasma concentrations of food-borne flavor compounds [Here, we describe an open-labeled, placebo-controlled, randomized intervention study determining the plasma concentration and biokinetics of the beverage-typical sweeteners saccharin, cyclamate, and acesulfame-K, dissolved in water and analyzed by HPLC-MS/MS. By means of RT-qPCR, we interrogated sweeteners’ effects on the transcriptional regulation of sweetener-specific chemosensory GPCRs and of certain cytokines and their receptors in isolated neutrophils from buffy coat samples in vitro, and from the intervention study-derived blood samples ex vivo. We further investigated (i) by Ca