Dietary Artificial Sweeteners: From Chemical Transformation in Food to Gut Microbial Processing

ABSTRACT Research on artificial sweeteners faces diverse challenges—ranging from long‐term health effects and technological and regulatory questions to environmental aspects—and requires an interdisciplinary approach. Currently, 10 individual substances are approved as artificial sweeteners in the European Union. In this brief review, we demonstrate how these substances are chemically stable under food processing and storage conditions both within and beyond the scope of their approved applications, and we address their stability in ecosystems. Individual degradation products have been described for all sweeteners; however, data on the occurrence and toxicity of these compounds are scarce. Limited stability is particularly evident for peptide‐based sweeteners such as aspartame under acidic conditions. Furthermore, we describe how certain artificial sweeteners (e.g., cyclamate, acesulfame K) can be metabolized by microbiota‐relevant microorganisms, and that other sweeteners (e.g., saccharin, sucralose) can alter the composition of the microbiota.