What are intense sweeteners?

Sweetness is a pleasant taste, but as people's lives get better and better, sweetness also brings troubles. Chronic diseases represented by obesity and diabetes are closely related to excessive energy intake, and sugar and oil have become the focus of attention in the dietary guidelines of various countries.

Scientists need to find a substitute for sugar, which is sweeteners. Some of these sweeteners are surprisingly sweet and provide no energy or only very little energy, making them a good helper for sugar-free foods. They are called high-intensity sweeteners, and there are about 20 types approved for use in food worldwide.

After all, the taste of sweeteners is different from that of sucrose. For example, saccharin has a distinct metallic aftertaste, acesulfame potassium has a bitter aftertaste, and stevioside has a bitter aftertaste. Therefore, sweeteners are often mixed to simulate the sweetness of sucrose.

But ignoring the taste, do you know what the sweetest sweetener in the world is?

Where does sweetness come from?

How sweet a substance is is expressed in terms of sweetness. The sweetness is often measured by tasting, for example, using a 0.5% sucrose solution as a reference, and then continuously diluting the test substance and comparing it with it.

If the test substance is just as sweet as sucrose solution at a concentration of 0.01%, then the sweetness of the test substance is 0.5/0.01=50, which is 50 times that of sucrose. Of course, using sucrose solutions of different concentrations as references may result in different sweetness values.

This is how sweeteners come about!

The most common artificial sweeteners are all "sweet mistakes." For example, the earliest artificial sweetener, saccharin, has a sweetness of 300. It was discovered because researchers did not wash their hands before eating, and found that the food they touched became sweeter.

The sweetness of acesulfame potassium and aspartame are both 200, and they were both discovered by researchers by accidentally licking their fingers.

The sweetness level of saccharin is 40. It was discovered because a graduate student left an unfinished cigarette on the laboratory table and found that the mouthpiece tasted sweet when he smoked it again.

Sucralose, which has a sweetness rating of 600, was found to be even more outrageous when a researcher mistakenly heard the word "test" as "taste"!

Do you dare to be more wrong?!

The strongest player in the food industry

After aspartame came out, scientists synthesized its successors, alitame and neotame. The sweetness of alitame can reach 2000, while the sweetness of neotame is off the charts, reaching 8000. This means that if the sweetness provided by a coffee spoon of neotame (about 1 gram) is converted into sucrose, it is enough for you to eat for almost a year!

Currently, neotame has been approved for use in food in the United States, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and my country. It may be the sweetest substance currently used in the food industry.

Pure natural fresh sweetener

Consumers have a natural aversion to "artificial synthesis", so the food industry has also sought help from the plant kingdom. Natural sweeteners extracted from sweet plants are no less effective than artificial ones, but their production is limited.

The most typical ones are glycosides. For example, the sweetness of glycyrrhizin is 100, the sweetness of stevioside is 250, and the sweetness of mogroside is 300. They are all sweeteners approved for use in food in my country, and are also widely used in the food industries in Europe, the United States and Japan.

Perilla frutescens, a natural sweetener that has not yet been approved for use in food, has a sweetness level of up to 2000.

The strongest sound in nature

You never thought that protein could be sweet, did you? In 1983, my country purified and identified the sweetness of 100-degree sweetness protein, but West Africa is the treasure trove of sweet proteins, where scientists have found more than five kinds of sweet proteins.

Among them is a plant called West African arrowroot, which contains several sweet proteins with similar structures. Its Chinese name is thaumatin. It has been approved for use in food in Europe and the United States, and is also allowed in my country.

Its sweetness is far less than the 600,000 reported online, but it is as high as 3,000. This may be the sweetest natural sweetener currently available.

This is truly cloyingly sweet!

When it comes to the limit of sweetness, natural evolution still loses to human wisdom. Scientists have cracked the molecular mechanism of taste buds sensing sweetness and designed a class of super sweet compounds. The common feature of this class of compounds is a chemical structure called "guanidine acetic acid", and their sweetness is at least hundreds of thousands.

Among them, researchers from the University of Lyon synthesized a compound called Lugduname in 1996 [scientific name N-(4-cyanophenyl)-N-(2,3-methylenedioxybenzyl)guanidineacetic acid], which has a sweetness of 300,000 and still tops the sweetness list.

What does this mean? Just half a Coke bottle cap can provide more sweetness than all the sugar you've eaten in your lifetime! Unfortunately, this type of compound has not yet been approved for use in food, so if you really want to try it, it's hard.