Health Notes
Another artificial sweetener… or is this “the One”?
In The Search For The Perfect Sugar Substitute, Another Candidate Emerges
from Dan Charles on NPR’s “All Things Considered”: There’s a new candidate in the century-old quest for perfect, guiltless sweetness. I encountered it at the annual meeting of the Institute of Food Technologists, a combination of Super Bowl, Mecca, and Disneyland for the folks who put the processing in processed food.
It was right in the middle of the vast exhibition hall, at the Tate & Lyle booth. This is the company that introduced the British Empire to the sugar cube, back in 1875. A century later, it invented sucralose, aka Splenda. “We have a deep understanding of sweetening,” says Michael Harrison, Tate & Lyle’s vice president of new product development. This year, his company launched its latest gift to your sweet tooth. It’s called allulose. “This is a rare sugar. A sugar that’s found in nature,” Harrison explains.
Chemically speaking, it’s almost identical to ordinary sugar. It has the same chemical formula as fructose and glucose, but the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are arranged slightly differently. And that slight difference means that my body won’t turn this sugar into calories. A few feet from us, people are lining up to taste it, in cups of chocolate and vanilla soft serve ice cream. I try it. It’s good. Sweet.
That’s not so unusual, of course. There are plenty of low-calorie sugar substitutes. But Harrison says most of them wouldn’t work in this ice cream. Because sugar, and allulose, do more than deliver sweetness: They also keep the ice cream from freezing solid. “It allows that ice cream to be soft-served. It’s a smooth, creamy texture,” Harrison says. “It’s bringing the functionality of sugar because it is sugar.”
Tate & Lyle has now come up with a way to manufacture this rare sugar in large quantities. To my ears, it all sounds practically perfect. All the pleasure of sugar with none of the pain. Could this finally be a free lunch? I called George Fahey, a nutrition expert at the University of Illinois.
Fahey is actually a fan of allulose. He signed off on a report to the Food and Drug Administration, arguing that allulose is safe. (Relying in part on that report, the FDA considers allulose, also called psicose, “generally recognized as safe.”) But Fahey says that there’s also good reason to be careful with low-calorie sugar substitutes like allulose. The same quality that makes them attractive can also make them quite unpleasant. Our bodies don’t digest them, he says. “They travel right through the small intestine and get into the large bowel.”
They’re just dietary fiber, Fahey says. Which is good. We need more fiber. But, he says, “the bad news is, you have to be very cautious about how much you eat of this stuff.” Because once it goes into the large bowel, all the bacteria that
