Sweeteners
consumers it is. However, maybe we shouldn’t try. All sweeteners have one thing in common – and that of course is that they are all sweet, which raises the question of whether the more we consume sweet things, the more we want.” To put it differently, is replacing sugar with something else sweet simply maintaining our preference for sweet tastes, thus making it easier to crash when we are presented with real sugar in the form of snacks, cakes and sweets?
Confronting our craving One researcher who has studied how food preferences change from early childhood to maturity is Dr Julie Mennella of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, the world’s only independent, non-profit scientific institute dedicated to interdisciplinary research on taste and smell.
The possible long-term health risks associated with sugar alcohol are still being explored.
Stanhope would welcome this admission, given that she found it “distressing” that the article was published in the first place.
“It was missing the most vital data,” she says. “The data where erythritol is fed to human subjects for a period of time to look for upregulated platelet activation should really have been gathered before publication. It got published because it is such a hot topic and the media jumps on any hint that sugar substitutes are worse than sugar.”
Interest in sugar alcohol is driven by the ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’ debate. Deriving sugar alcohol from whole plants is extremely expensive because the levels are so low, so most are manufactured using genetically programmed yeasts, which mimic the same metabolic pathways of plants but can produce specific components in large quantities.
0.2calories
The amount of calories per gram that Erythritol
contains, making it 60-80% as sweet as sugar.
2.4calories
The calories per gram that Xylitol contains – despite boasting the same sweetness as sugar.
FDA 64
“Consumers tend to label sweeteners as artificial if they are made chemically, as is the case with aspartame, but consider them natural if they are contained in a plant,” emphasises Stanhope. “However, it is very costly to isolate erythritol from plants. Therefore, erythritol is made by yeasts. That is the way of the future, and it is ecologically beneficial to use yeasts.”
Erythritol seems to offer a healthy replacement for sugar because it contains almost no calories. Other sugar alcohols contain 2.4 calories per gram, compared to four calories per gram for regular sugar. Stanhope is currently feeding human subjects erythritol, and then measuring the type of outcomes reported in the Nature article, including looking for signs of platelet activation. As yet, there are no completed trials on the metabolic risk factors of erythritol, though it has seen positive results in terms of blood glucose response. “There is a lot of work still to be done before we know whether erythritol is healthy,” Stanhope stresses. “And, assuming the dietary interventions studies do confirm it is safe, it may be hard to convince
“There is an interesting developmental change in terms of sweet taste,” she explains. “Infants are born with a preference for it as a quality of human milk – then children prefer higher levels of sweetness, but that decreases after growth during mid-adolescence. We evolved in an environment with no artificial sweeteners, and the sweet taste is a signal for calories, so a child prefers sweetness more than adults during periods of maximal growth.”
The preference for sweet and salt decreases after bone growth, but Mennella feels that children are now more vulnerable to an environment where sweets are everywhere. She believes that when children are learning how and what to eat, they are especially vulnerable, and will prefer sweet foods, noting not only that there is little research on the effect of sweeteners on children, but also that their efficacy in preventing obesity is debatable. In other words, do they they just teach children that foods should be sweet? Sugar alcohols show promise because they are sweet – erythritol has around 70% of the sweetness of sucrose – while also having less of the unpleasant aftertaste that is reported with acesulfame potassium and other artificial sweeteners. In the case of erythritol, meanwhile, it’s metabolised in a way that could limit health risks.
Once you add the fact that erythritol has no calories, and is so small that it doesn’t cause the gastrointestinal issues of other sugar alcohols, and no wonder the market is expected to grow from $225m in 2023 to around $449m by 2033. But does it still exacerbate the problem of cravings for sweetness?
Shapiro, for her part, advises caution. “I believe the use of artificial sweeteners can increase sweet cravings as our threshold for how sweet something should taste increases,” she says. “If you use them, use them sparingly.” That seems like good advice – whatever kind of sugar you’re tempted by. ●
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com
Tobik/
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90
