The actual paper is far less impressive than the headlines. Erythritol is created by your own body through one of the pathways in which we metabolize glucose. Unless you're collecting data on circulating erythritol, and these investigators did not, then there is no way of knowing if dietary erythritol is increasing cardiovascular risk. Bottom line is that causality isn't demonstrated even remotely based on this study.

I have no idea whether dietary erythritol is good or bad or neutral but I'll take a pretty educated guess and say your risk of a cardiovascular event isn't going to increase based on this quest bar. Though if I was picking a product like this, I'd want a far higher protein amount.

What I posted comes directly from their own paper.
1. Erythritol is created by your own body. This is a pretty important fact to be aware of.
2. Their findings don't differentiate between endogenous and dietary erythritol. Do you see the problem here?
3. According to them, the participants were enrolled before erythritol became a major food additive.
4. Erythritol levels were still high a day after dietary consumption. From endogenous erythritol!

This isn't difficult to comprehend. The study doesn't show anything to link dietary erythritol to cardiovascular disease. It doesn't even show causality between circulating erythritol and disease.

I don't know whether or not erythritol is bad for you, but this paper doesn't demonstrate it.

At this point the research is pretty clear that exercise and energy balance in diet are the things that people need to keep in mind for longevity. Avoiding erythritol in a quest bar is likely far down the checklist of things to worry about when it comes to good health.

Your anecdotal story doesn't actually show anything. Are you telling me you never ate a single artificial sweetener, then ate some and had heart related episodes, then stopped and they went away?

Honestly these are my favorite, and I've had prob every quest flavor. The caramel hero ones are good too.