sweetener, any of various natural and artificial substances that provide a sweet taste in foods and beverages. In addition to their sweetening power, they may be used in such processes as food preservation, fermentation (in brewing and wine making), baking (where they contribute to texture, tenderization, and leavening), and food browning and caramelization.
Natural sweeteners may be both nutritive and flavorsome and thus popular both as food and as flavouring. However, because common sugar and other nutritive sweeteners such as honey and corn syrup are associated with health problems (such as obesity and tooth decay) or are even a threat to life (for diabetics), there have been efforts since the 19th century to produce nonnutritive sweeteners that are not subject to metabolism and contain little or no caloric value. Nonnutritive sweeteners, which may be either artificial (synthetic) or derived from plants, include such compounds as saccharin, aspartame, cyclamates, and thaumatin. The popular nonnutritive sweetener stevia contains a number of natural compounds, including stevioside and rebaudioside A, that can be more than 300 times sweeter than saccharose, the sweetener derived from sugarcane.
Sugar is a generic term for a category of carbohydrate compounds known as sucrose, or saccharose (C12H22O11). A group of related compounds are corn sugar (called glucose or dextrose), fruit sugar (fructose or levulose), milk sugar (lactose), and malt sugar (maltose). Sucrose is a disaccharide; that is, it is made up of two simple sugars, or monosaccharides—glucose and fructose. It is one of the sweetest of sugars. If sucrose is taken as a standard of 1, the sweetness of glucose is 0.5–0.6, that of lactose is 0.27, and that of maltose is 0.6. Fructose, found in fruits and honey, is the sweetest, being 1.1 to 2.0 times as sweet as sucrose.
Sucrose is commercially derived chiefly from sugarcane and sugar beets but also comes from such sources as maple trees, sugar palms (especially date palms), and sorghum. Sucrose is found in all plants: an apple is about 4 percent sucrose, 6 percent fructose, and 1 percent glucose (by weight), and a grape is about 2 percent sucrose, 8 percent fructose, 7 percent glucose, and 2 percent maltose (by weight). Honey is composed principally of fructose and glucose, the composition depending on the original nectar collected by the honeybees and on the amount of processing and storage time.
In the development of low-calorie sweeteners, the problems are several and are not limited to sweetness. Some sweeteners lose their sweetness at high temperatures (making them often unsuitable in cooking) or lose the sweetness over time (giving them a short shelf life). Some nonnutritive sweeteners have an undesirable aftertaste. Sugar furthermore has functional properties not found wholly in any other sweeteners. Sugar adds bulk and texture to baked goods; it helps in forming the structure of the baked food, provides moistness, tenderness, and anti-toughening characteristics, and contributes to leavening. In addition, it has a preservative effect (as in jellies and preserves) and helps generally to prevent spoilage. It serves as food for fermenting organisms that are important in making such things as alcoholic beverages, breads, and pickles. In soft drinks, in addition to providing sweetness, sugar provides “mouthfeel” and body and helps to stabilize the carbon dioxide. Sugar, in sum, has many functional properties in food, and no other sweetener has so far been developed to duplicate all or even many of them.
The artificial sweetener saccharin (ortho-sulfobenzoic acid imide) was discovered in 1879 by two German researchers, I. Remsen and C. Fahlberg, and has about 300 to 500 times the sweetening power of cane sugar. It is manufactured on a large scale in several countries in the form of saccharin, sodium saccharin, and calcium saccharin. Although its safety was the subject of controversy during the 1970s and ’80s, it is still widely used.
Cyclamates, a group of synthetic sweeteners derived from cyclohexylamine or cyclamic acid, were discovered in 1937 and are about 30 times as sweet as sucrose. Although used in several countries, cyclamates were banned in some countries (notably the United States, in 1969) after being suspected of carcinogenicity.
Aspartame, or aspartylphenylalanine (marketed as NutraSweet, Equal, Egal, or Canderal), was discovered in 1965. It has some caloric value (though negligible) and is about 150–200 times as sweet as sucrose. Its safety remains controversial, but it is now the most popular sweetening ingredient in diet soft drinks. It tends to lose its sweetness over long periods, but manufacturers have taken measures to enhance the stability through additives.
Thaumatin, a protein extracted and purified from Thaumatococcus danielli, a plant found in western Africa, has found increasing use in Japan since its approval there in 1979. It combines well with monosodium glutamate and is used in typical Japanese seasonings as well as in chewing gum.
Acesulfame potassium (marketed as Sunette) was approved in the United States in 1988. It is about 130–200 times as sweet as sucrose, has good shelf life and high stability, and was initially used in dry food mixes.
Stevioside, derived from the plant Stevia rebaudiana, has been used in Japan, Paraguay, and a few other countries as the low-calorie sweetener stevia. It is about 300 times as sweet as sucrose.
A potential noncaloric sweetener, patented in the United States in 1981, is “left-handed” sugar, or l-sugar. It is chemically identical to sucrose except that its molecular structure is an opposite mirror image of standard “right-handed” sucrose; it is said to look, act, and taste like sucrose, but the human body seems not to recognize it and metabolize it, so that it passes from the body basically unchanged. The manufacture of l-sugar, however, has proved prohibitively difficult and expensive.
Research—mainly in Europe, North America, and Japan—continues on hundreds of potential sweeteners.