Courtney Black Accused of Sweetener Hypocrisy By James Smith
The year is 2025, and James Smith is back to doing what he does best: calling out influencers.
Widely regarded as the fitness dark knight, Smith’s rise to fame was partly owed to posting straight-talking takes on common health myths.
Over the years, those explosive videos have become less frequent. These days, he spends more of his time scaling Neutonic and helping other creators achieve online success.
However, he recently gave fans another glimpse of his former self with a damning exposé of several creatine gummy brands.
Now, in yet another nostalgic callout, Smith has taken aim at Dubai-based influencer Courtney Black.
Here’s what went down.
James Smith Takes On Courtney Black
Known as the ‘Pocket PT’, Courtney Black regularly posts home workouts and healthy recipe tips to her 845,000 Instagram followers.
She’s also the founder of the Courtney Black app — a fitness platform designed to help women build muscle and drop fat.
In one of her latest videos, the high-energy star spoke about low-calorie foods and the supposed impact of artificial sweeteners.
The caption, “Sweeteners are making you fat,” featured in the opening few seconds.
Black spoke about the effect her previous sweetener-heavy diet had on her portion control, gut health, and even skin.
This caught Smith’s attention, drawing the 36-year-old into a lengthy response video.
“Courtney Black, we need to have a word,” he said. “Today, I’m here to help you understand the science to do with artificial sweeteners.
“And again, I know you hate me at the moment. About two years ago, I did make a very insensitive pop to the fact you’ve been caught editing your photos online.
“I apologise — I was drunk. Now let’s look at your most recent reel…
“So there are two claims here. One, that sweeteners are bad for fat loss. And the second thing is that sweeteners disrupt your gut.
“Let’s first of all start off with artificial sweeteners and obesity. But just before we get into the real evidence about sweeteners, you have endorsements with OxyShred — and that has artificial sweeteners.
“And there are people within your fitness community — you know that group you have with 73,000 members, which is very impressive by the way — that are buying OxyShred with sweeteners in it in a bid to lose weight, which I thought it stopped doing.
“Now, you could defend yourself and say, ‘oh, I haven’t endorsed OxyShred in a year.’
“Fine. But if we go to the link in your bio, you have things on your Amazon store, of which you get commission, one being Monin Premium Vanilla sugar-free syrup.
“Again, it contains artificial sweeteners. So just before we get into the evidence, surely if you were that against artificial sweeteners you would take down the products you get commission off when people buy them.
“Both of which contain sucralose, an artificial sweetener.”
Smith pointed towards a study conducted in 2020 into the effects of non-nutritive sweeteners on body weight and BMI.
He read a section from the findings, which surmised: “Participants with overweight/obesity and adults showed significant favourable weight/BMI differences with non-nutritive sweeteners.”
“In fact, there’s quite a lot of evidence that says non-nutritive sweeteners can actually benefit fat loss,” Smith added.
“I think it goes without saying that if you were to pick a Coke Zero to get a fix for your sweet tooth and have something that doesn’t have calories in, it’s a bit of a no brainer.”
He then moved on to Courtney Black’s second point linking sweeteners to poor gut health.
“I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be quoting a study from 2014 done by Suez et al, where we start to see a bit of sweeteners causing genuine gut dysfunction,” he continued.
“But there’s a problem. This study was done in rodents. So if you are a rat you probably have something to worry about.
“Now, being a personal trainer there are several people in the industry that you can go to very quickly. You’ve either got Mike Israetel, Layne Norton, or Menno Henselmans.
“Even recently, Menno has gone to the lengths of creating amazing articles to go through all the nuance of artificial sweeteners.”
The 36-year-old then pulled up a specific article where Henselmans lists a host of artificial sweeteners and the effects they each have on the gut.
Henselmans even points readers in the direction of studies they can reference in order to research more themselves.
Quoting one of the more recent clinical trials, Smith said: “In conclusion, our study showed that aspartame and sucralose did not cause measurable changes in the gut microbiota after 14 days of realistic intake in healthy participants.
“This is in contrast to the many microbiome studies conducted in animal models. However, their applicability to human health and disease may be limited.”
Smith finished by saying: “And the last point is this: of course the majority of obese people are going to have the sweetened version. Of course they’re going to reach for the Diet Coke or the Coke Zero. They’re obese.
“But just because we can find an association between sweeteners and obese people, it doesn’t mean it’s the causation of it.
“You are welcome to have your anecdotal experiences however you want.
“But when you make blanket statements that are false — ones that can be easily researched and could mislead people to actually make their journey of improving their gut health or becoming less obese more difficult — you’re going to get called out.
“You could have found all of this out within four minutes on Google. Please don’t be everything that’s wrong with the fitness industry.
“Hope we can make up and be friends again soon.”
Some fans leapt to Courtney Black’s defence, saying she did put forward valid points about the over-reliance on sweeteners and the impact that can have on portion control and choosing whole food diets.
Others quizzed her about the affiliations with OxyShred and similarly sweetened products. More, however, were simply pleased to see Smith back to his old tricks.
The exact link between gut health and artificial sweeteners seems to be a developing one.
A study published in 2022 noted that “several non-nutritive sweetener compounds are now hypothesised to affect human physiology by modulating the gut microbiome, though the mechanism for this action remains unclear.”
