If you’re overweight, have type 2 diabetes or even if you’re just trying to stay healthy, you may be using this sweetener believing it’s a healthy alternative to sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

In fact, doctors often urge their diabetes patients to use this sweetener.

But a new study proofs that this “healthy” sweetener actually spikes blood sugar level and loads on belly fat.

Artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucaralose, and saccharin have long been recommended for people trying to lose weight or manage their blood sugar level. Especially those suffering diabetes (both type 1 and 2).

But several recent studies have indicated that people consuming diet sodas and other artificially sweetened food products actually tend to gain weight.

One new study, however, published recently in Nature, reveals that weight gain may be the least of your worries if you use artificial sweetener. It will actually skyrocket your blood sugar levels, causing life-threatening diabetes symptoms.

More importantly, this is the first scientific study that shows why this happens.

In the first step of the study, scientists gave a high dose of various types of artificial sweeteners to a group of rats.

Surprisingly, their blood sugar levels immediately began to rise. And kept on rising as they were fed the sweetener. And, shockingly, it even rose higher than the blood sugar of comparison rats who were fed normal cane sugar.

Now, this doesn’t make any sense since mammals don’t have the ability to digest artificial sweeteners. Under normal conditions, they would be flushed out without reaching our blood stream (just like fiber). That’s what makes them ‘calorie free’ or ‘Zero calorie.’

But the researchers had a theory and they tested it.

You see, as much as we would like to think our body was 100% our own, there are millions of tiny little microbes that live throughout it. Some are harmful (like flu bacteria and viruses) but some we couldn’t live without (like many gut bacteria).

In fact, these microbes are essential part of our digestive and immune system. And although mammals can’t process artificial sweeteners on their own, specific microbes living in some mammals can.

To prove their theory, the researchers gave their (now pre-diabetic) rats high doses of antibiotics, which kill all microbes. And as expected, once the microbes were killed, the blood sugar spike from consuming artificial sweeteners disappeared.

As humans, we don’t like to compare ourselves to rats. So scientists decided to make a similar test with a small group of humans.

They fed the humans high doses of artificial sweeteners for seven days and sampled their gut bacteria level as well as blood sugar level. After only seven days, half of the humans had their gut flora change and their blood sugar levels spiked.

This may mean that not all humans react to artificial sweeteners in the same way. Or maybe the test period was simply too short for all test subjects to be affected. Either way, I would strongly recommend staying away from artificial sweeteners and even take regular sugar over them.

If you have, however, been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes or rise in blood sugar level (pre-diabetes), the question is not just about artificial sweeteners or not.

It’s a question of 3 simple steps to completely reverse this process. Here are the 3 steps my mother used to completely reverse her type 2 diabetes….