If you give healthy mice a common food preservative called potassium sorbate for 10 weeks, it doesn’t make more of the good gut bacteria chemicals called short-chain fatty acids.

Giving mice a common food preservative called potassium sorbate for 10 weeks didn’t change their blood sugar, fat levels, or the size of their organs and fat stores.

If you give healthy mice a common food preservative called potassium sorbate every day for 10 weeks at fairly high doses, their livers might show more signs of inflammation and higher levels of a specific inflammation chemical, but their body weight, fat, and blood sugar/fat levels don’t change much.

After stopping potassium sorbate (a food preservative) for five weeks, mice had more of a certain good gut bacteria and made more of a chemical called isobutyric acid.

This claim says that a food preservative called potassium sorbate kills off the good bacteria in your gut that calm down inflammation, but leaves the bad bacteria that cause inflammation alone—making your whole body more inflamed.