I almost passed over this one, thinking it was too “sciencey,” and not of general interest. But the story stayed with me. I began to look at all of the diet food I had, being a diabetic. I was amazed to find that the non-sugar sweetener in most things such as protein powder, even soups, was sucralose. However, research is indicating that the artificial sweetener sucralose is genotoxic, meaning that it has an effect of breaking up DNA. Researchers subjected human blood and gut tissues to the chemical and found DNA breakdown. And there was a negative effect upon the gut tissue: "When we exposed sucralose and sucralose-6-acetate to gut epithelial tissues—the tissue that lines your gut wall—we found that both chemicals cause 'leaky gut.' Basically, they make the wall of the gut more permeable. The chemicals damage the 'tight junctions,' or interfaces, where cells in the gut wall connect to each other.
"A leaky gut is problematic, because it means that things that would normally be flushed out of the body in feces are instead leaking out of the gut and being absorbed into the bloodstream."