Background
Home • Search • CU CAM Site

 

Home
Background
Regulation
Aspartame
Stevia
References

 

 



Text Box: What is a sweetener?    A sweetener can be any substance added to food to make it taste sweeter.  Historically, table sugar (sucrose), honey, and molasses were the sweeteners used.  Today there are a host of sweeteners used in whole or purified forms.  Let's start with table sugar, that is, sucrose.  Sucrose is purified from sugar cane and from sugar beets.  It supplies 4kcal energy/gram.  It tastes sweet and is the standard to which other sweeteners are compared. Nutritive Sweeteners (NS) are other sweeteners that also provide energy, measured in kcal, while adding sweetness.  Aspartame is a nutritive sweetener which supplies 4kcal/gm, like sucrose.  Aspartame, however, is much sweeter, about 180 times sweeter, than sucrose.  So, far less, about 180 times less, aspartame than sucrose is required to achieve a sweet taste. Non-nutritive Sweeteners (NNS) or Zero Calorie Sweeteners are sweeteners that do no provide any energy to the body, but still add a sweet taste.  NNS may not supply any energy because they are not absorbed or because even though they are absorbed, they are not metabolized by the body.  What are natural sweeteners?  "Natural" in this context is a vague term and subject to individual interpretation.  We tend to think of products that are most like the form found growing wild to be the most "natural."  Those products that are whole parts of plants (the leaves or the roots, for example) might be the most natural, those that are extracted or purified from plants might be slightly less natural, while those that are synthesized from other chemicals in the laboratory are the least natural.  Sometimes "natural" implies healthier, sometimes it does not.  For example, the bitter almond contains cyanide and is deadly in its natural form.  Through use we have genetically selected the least toxic almonds so that those currently grown for food contain no cyanide.  Another very interesting example is curare, a vine found in tropical climates that is best known as a poison.  Curare extracts were applied to arrows for hunting and warfare.   When injected directly into the blood stream, they acted as potent muscle relaxers.  In Brazil and Peru, however, curare roots were also used medicinally and given orally to treat fever, to increase urination, and to treat kidney stones and testicular inflammation.  In a less "natural" context, Western allopathic medicine  has used d-tubocurarine, an active ingredient purified from curare, as a muscle relaxant during surgery.  Practitioners, in this case doctors and nurses, can standardize the doses of purified d-tubocurarine in order to achieve the required level of muscle relaxation for the required period of time and can artificially ventilate the patient as necessary.  There is, of course a case to be made, that in purifying one single product from a plant, we are missing a host of other chemicals that may also be beneficial.  Or, in purifying one single chemical we may loose the beneficial effect because there are multiple chemicals within the plant that work synergistically or additively to impart the effect.  This is the case with kava kava, in which case the ground kava root has more of a depressant effect than any of the individual lactones purified from it.  Unfortunately, kava kava has its own toxicities as well. Synthetic sweeteners are those sweeteners that are created in a laboratory setting from other chemicals.  Sometimes, those sweeteners are modifications of other, more "natural" sweeteners.  For example, sucralose (Splenda) is chemically modified sucrose in which 3 hydroxyl groups (-OH) have been replaced with chlorine (-Cl).  Aspartame, on the other hand, is synthesized from phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol.  Phenylalanine and aspartic acid are amino acids, the subunits of proteins, and therefore naturally occurring in the environment.  So, as you see, there is no fine line between natural and synthetic, but a continuum that connects the two.