The Surprising Sugar Source In Your Toothpaste

Oftentimes, headlines suggest that experts are either wrong about something or have been hiding something, when the reality is a little different, e.g:

• Scientists won’t tell you this! (…because it’s not true)
• Doctors hate this weight loss trick! (…because it is dangerous and the weight lost is not fat)
• Etc

Our headline today, however, is more a matter of “scientists have been saying one thing, and now it turns out that’s not entirely correct”.

If a chemical ends in -ose, it’s a sugar

Sometimes, that has obvious implications for our metabolism, as with glucose, fructose, or the disaccharide of those, sucrose.

You can read more about those, here: From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?

Sometimes, it’s a “sugar that doesn’t behave like a sugar”, such as sucralose, which is chemically a sugar, and is sweet, and has been considered to not get metabolized as a sugar, and instead pass through as fiber (though that may now be up for review, in light of what we will share today).

Sucralose does have other potential drawbacks, in any case: The Sucralose News: Scaremongering Or Serious?

And indeed, sweeteners in general have their problems just by virtue of being sweet to the taste: The Problem With Sweeteners

That goes for resistant starches, too

“Resistant” here means that they are resistant to digestion, and pass through as fiber.

“Starch”, however, means that indeed this is a chain of sugars. For example, guar gum, a commonly-used natural thickening agent, is in large part (the galactomannan part) chemically a polymer of d-galactose and d-mannose.

We wrote about it here: The Food Additive You Do Want

What, then, of cellulose, being another -ose chemical, and specifically, a polysaccharide of β(1→4) glucan-linked d-glucose units in a big chain?

Researchers (Dr. Deepesh Panwar et al.) found that cellulose-based thickeners (found in toothpaste, and many food products), previously believed to be indigestible, can be broken down by gut bacteria when enzymes are activated by adjacent natural dietary polysaccharides:

• Previous work: bacteria (Bacteroides and Segatella/Prevotella strains) could not grow on cellulose alone.
• New discovery: when “primed” with natural plant polysaccharides (cereal mixed-linkage β-glucan or dicot xyloglucan), certain strains could metabolize the cellulose.

In other words, previous in vitro lab work had carefully recreated gut conditions including a microbiome, but then added the cellulose alone as a testing agent, without adding anything else (because after all, they didn’t want anything to contaminate the results).

But the reality is, there’s never normally nothing else in our gut!

As for what triggers the breakdown of this “unbreakdownable” cellulose, it turns out that many natural fibers in fruits, vegetables and cereals prime the bacterial enzymes that then also act on the cellulose (including: artificial cellulose derivatives).

So, in other words: the cellulose-based thickener in your toothpaste and many food products is, if ingested, getting broken down as sugar after all, if you have a healthy gut, in any case.

You can read their paper in full, here: Artificial cellulose derivatives are metabolized by select human gut Bacteroidota upon priming with common plant β-glucans

What does this mean for my health?

Must you throw out your toothpaste, and start going through the condiment cupboard?

No, these things are fine, and this discovery doesn’t really change that.

And in particular, there is no threat to your teeth from cellulose-thickened toothpaste, nor from cellulose-based “sugar-free” gum, for that matter.

Technically yes, it may mean that something advertised as containing zero calories technically has a small calorie value, but just how much toothpaste/gum are you eating, really?

And even with that in mind, your teeth themselves remain, as we say, unaffected. After all, the oral microbiome is very different from that of your colon (well, it certainly should be, at least!), so those same strains are not there to digest it.

In fact, the β-glucan mentioned in the study? The kind that, if present in your gut, enables the bacteria to digest the cellulose?

We wrote about it here: The Best Kind Of Fiber For Overall Health? ← it’s β-glucan! Oats are a great source.

See also: What Do The Different Kinds Of Fiber Do? 30 Foods That Rank Highest

Enjoy!