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Someone who has long harboured doubts about the health benefits of artificial sweeteners is Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and author of Food For Life: The New Science of Eating Well.
长期以来一直对人工甜味剂的健康好处持怀疑态度的人是蒂姆·斯佩克特。他是伦敦国王学院的遗传流行病学教授，著有《生命食粮: 健康饮食新科学》一书。
Until about 10 years ago, Spector used to drink a lot of Diet Coke.
直到大约10年前，斯派特还常常喝大量健怡可乐。
Then he began reading up on sweeteners and was startled to discover that in big population studies, they didn’t seem to be helping people lose weight. This struck him as odd, given their lack of calories.
后来，他开始阅读有关甜味剂的资料，并惊讶地发现，在大规模的人口研究中，甜味剂似乎并没有帮助人们减肥。这让他觉得很奇怪，因为它们并不含热量。
Spector decided to conduct an experiment, using himself as a guinea pig.
斯佩克特决定做个实验，把自己当小白鼠。
When he hooked himself up to a glucose monitor and swallowed a sachet of sucralose – the main ingredient in Splenda, one of the most common sugar substitutes for use in tea and coffee – his blood sugar spiked, as if he had been consuming sugar.
当他为自己连上血糖检测仪，吞下一小袋三氯蔗糖时——三氯蔗糖是善品糖的主要成分，是一种用于茶和咖啡中的最常见的代糖——他的血糖飙升，就好像他一直在吃糖。
“It was not supposed to do that,” Spector said when we spoke on the phone earlier this year.
“不应该是这种情况，”斯佩克特在今年早些时候接受我们的电话采访时说。
Of course, a single human guinea pig is not the same as peer-reviewed science, and when Spector tried to replicate his findings with colleagues, they did not react to the Splenda in the same way.
当然，单个的实验对象与经同行评议过的科学不同，当斯佩克特试图与同事们复证他的发现时，他们对善品糖的反应并不一样。
Spector told me that he had found a frustrating lack of experimental trial data on the effects of sweeteners on human bodies.
斯佩克特告诉我，令人沮丧的是，他发现关于甜味剂对人体影响的实验数据非常缺乏。
“Until last Friday!” he exclaimed, with excitement in his voice.
“直到上星期五!” 他激动地喊道。
He went on to tell me about a paper by Prof Eran Elinav, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, south of Tel Aviv, whose work seemed to confirm what Spector had thought but been unable to prove.
他接着告诉我，特拉维夫以南的魏茨曼科学研究所的免疫学家埃兰·伊莱纳夫教授发表了一篇论文，他的研究似乎认可斯佩克特的想法，但无法证实
A key argument for sweeteners, championed by the industry, is that they are metabolically “inert”.
业界支持甜味剂的一个关键论点是，它们在代谢上呈“惰性”。
That is, they can deliver the sweetness our mouths crave without affecting the rest of our bodies in any way.
也就是说，它们可以提供我们嘴巴渴望的甜味，而不会以任何方式影响我们身体的其他部分。
However, the new study, which was conducted by Elinav and more than 20 colleagues in Israel, the US and Germany and published in the prestigious scientific journal Cell in August, cast serious doubt on this foundational claim.
然而，一项新研究对这一基本说法提出了严重质疑，这项新研究是由伊莱纳夫和他在以色列、美国和德国的20多名同事进行的，并于8月发表在著名的科学杂志《细胞》上。
In the study, 120 people – all healthy adults who had consumed no sweeteners for the preceding six months – were split into six groups, each of which was assigned a particular sweetener, apart from two control groups, one of which was assigned a sachet of glucose, and a final group that had nothing at all.
在这项研究中，将120名健康的成年人分成六组，这些人在实验前的六个月没有摄入过甜味剂，除了两组对照组，每组分配一种特定的甜味剂。对照组中的一组分配一袋葡萄糖，剩下一组什么也不分配。
Twice a day for two weeks, each group consumed a sachet of their assigned material.
在两周内，每组每天两次饮用分配给他们的一袋材料。
The study monitored participants’ blood sugar levels and microbes in their stool samples.
这项研究还对实验者的血糖水平与粪便样本中的微生物进行了监测。
