Erythritol is not an artificial sweetener. It belongs to a separate category called sugar alcohols, which have a different chemical structure, origin, and behavior in the body compared to artificial sweeteners like aspartame or saccharin. The confusion is common because sugar alcohols are sometimes lumped together with artificial sweeteners under the broad label of “sugar substitutes,” but the FDA classifies them as distinct categories.
What Erythritol Actually Is
Erythritol is a sugar alcohol, a type of carbohydrate with a chemical structure similar to sugar. Other sugar alcohols include xylitol, sorbitol, maltitol, and mannitol. These compounds occur naturally in certain foods. Erythritol is found in small amounts in fruits, vegetables, and fermented foods like soy sauce and cheese.
The erythritol sold commercially, though, isn’t extracted from fruit. It’s produced through fermentation, a process in which yeast breaks down simple sugars into erythritol. One common method uses an osmophilic yeast called Candida magnoliae to ferment cane molasses, a byproduct of the sugar industry. This is closer to how beer or yogurt is made than to how artificial sweeteners are synthesized in a lab.
How Sugar Alcohols Differ From Artificial Sweeteners
The FDA recognizes six high-intensity sweeteners as food additives: aspartame, acesulfame potassium, sucralose, neotame, advantame, and saccharin. These are the compounds most people mean when they say “artificial sweetener.” They’re intensely sweet in tiny amounts and were created through chemical synthesis. Aspartame, for instance, is made by combining two amino acids in a specific configuration that happens to taste extremely sweet.
Sugar alcohols work differently. They provide bulk and texture like regular sugar, and their sweetness ranges from 25% to 100% as sweet as sugar, depending on the specific sugar alcohol. Erythritol lands at about 60% to 70% the sweetness of table sugar. Because sugar alcohols are less sweet gram-for-gram than sugar, they’re used in much larger quantities than high-intensity artificial sweeteners, which is why you’ll see erythritol listed in grams on a label rather than milligrams.
There’s also a third category worth knowing about: plant-based sweeteners like stevia (extracted from the leaves of the Stevia rebaudiana plant) and monk fruit (from a fruit native to southern China). These are natural, high-intensity sweeteners, distinct from both sugar alcohols and artificial sweeteners.
Calories, Blood Sugar, and Dental Effects
Sugar alcohols as a group are slightly lower in calories than sugar and don’t promote tooth decay or cause sudden spikes in blood glucose. Erythritol stands out even among sugar alcohols on these points. It contains roughly 0.2 calories per gram, compared to 4 calories per gram for table sugar. It has essentially no effect on blood sugar or insulin levels, which is why it’s popular in products marketed to people managing diabetes or following low-carb diets.
The reason erythritol behaves so differently from sugar comes down to how your body handles it. About 90% of the erythritol you swallow gets absorbed quickly from your small intestine into your bloodstream. But your body doesn’t break it down for energy. Instead, it passes through unchanged and gets excreted in urine. Research on healthy adults shows that about 30% of an ingested dose appears in urine within three hours, and roughly 78% within 24 hours. Less than 20% reaches the large intestine, where gut bacteria could potentially ferment it.
Digestive Tolerance
That low rate of fermentation in the gut is why erythritol is easier on the stomach than other sugar alcohols. Sorbitol and maltitol are notorious for causing gas, bloating, and diarrhea because larger portions reach the colon and get fermented by bacteria. Erythritol causes far fewer of these effects at typical serving sizes.
That said, there is a limit. The laxative threshold for erythritol is estimated at about 0.66 grams per kilogram of body weight for men and 0.8 grams per kilogram for women. For a 150-pound (68 kg) person, that works out to roughly 45 to 54 grams in a single sitting, well above what most people would consume from a few servings of an erythritol-sweetened product. But if you’re using it heavily in baking or drinking multiple sweetened beverages in a short window, you could cross that line.
Cardiovascular Concerns
Despite its long safety record, erythritol drew attention in 2023 when a study published in Nature Medicine found that cardiac patients with high blood levels of erythritol were twice as likely to experience a major cardiac event (heart attack, stroke, or death) over the following three years compared to those with low levels. A follow-up study from the same Cleveland Clinic research team in 2024 added further evidence that erythritol may promote blood clotting.
These findings are significant but still being debated. High blood levels of erythritol in these studies could reflect heavy dietary intake, but the body also produces small amounts of erythritol on its own through normal metabolism. It’s not yet clear whether consuming erythritol in typical dietary amounts directly raises cardiovascular risk or whether the association reflects something else about the health of the people studied. For now, these results haven’t changed erythritol’s regulatory status.
Regulatory Status
Erythritol holds “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) status with the FDA, which confirmed it had no questions about erythritol’s safety as recently as 2019. It’s approved for use in a wide range of products, including baked goods, beverages, chewing gum, frozen desserts, candy, jams, dairy products, and sugar substitutes, at concentrations ranging from 3% to 99%. This broad approval reflects decades of safety data predating the more recent cardiovascular research.
So while erythritol sits on the shelf next to artificial sweeteners and often gets marketed alongside them, it’s a fundamentally different substance: a naturally occurring sugar alcohol, produced through fermentation, that your body absorbs and excretes without metabolizing. Whether that distinction matters for your health in the long run is a question researchers are still working to answer.