When rats and mice eat sucralose, a common artificial sweetener, their guts get more inflamed, their intestinal lining gets weaker, and the good and bad bacteria in their intestines change — all of which might cause body-wide inflammation.

Eating a lot of sucralose (an artificial sweetener) over time might make your body less responsive to insulin and change the good bacteria in your gut, which could make it harder for your body to manage blood sugar.

When mice and rats eat artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose for a long time, their gut bacteria get out of balance, lose variety, and start acting more inflammatory—which might explain why these sweeteners could make the body more prone to inflammation.