18.7 What is the sweetest compound? (Chemistry)
Description
This article is from the Chemistry FAQ, by Bruce Hamilton B.Hamilton@irl.cri.nz with numerous contributions by others.
18.7 What is the sweetest compound? (Chemistry)
Most scales use sucrose as a sweetness of 1, and compare the relative
sweetness of other sweeteners to sucrose.
Name Relative Sweetness Category D-Glucose 0.46 Natural Food Product Lactose 0.68 " " " D-Fructose 0.84 " " " Sucrose 1 " " " Cyclamate 30 EC Permitted, USA Prohibited Aspartame 200 EC, USA Permitted. Saccharin 300 EC Permitted, USA Prohibited Sucralose 650 Au, Ca Permitted, trials elsewhere Alitame 2,000 Undergoing trials Thaumatin 3,000 EC permitted, US chewing gum only. Carrelame 160,000 Guanidine sweetener Bernardame 200,000 " " Sucrononate 200,000 " " Lugduname 220,000 " "
The guanidine sweeteners are not expected to be approved for food use.
There are several other important attributes of sweeteners, such as
low toxicity, no after-taste, whether metabolised or excreted, etc.,
that must also be considered.
The potency scale is fairly flexible, and differing publications can
assign different values. The August 1995 copy of the Journal of Chemical
Education contained several papers from a symposium on sweeteners [3,4],
and an article in Chemistry and Industry also discusses sweeteners from
both natural and artificial sources [5], and Kirk Othmer has a monograph
on sweeteners.
The sweetener used in "diet" beverages is usually Aspartame, and they
are usually required to display a warning for phenylketurics that the
product contains a source of phenylalanine. As Aspartame slowly degrades
in acid solutions, such products also have a "use-by" date.
Although banned by the FDA in 1970 ( because a mixture of saccharin and
cyclamate caused tumours in test animals ), saccharin has been still
marketed under extensions of approval, Ironically, subsequent work
implicated the saccharin, and the cyclamate was found not to be the
tumour-causing agent, but it is still banned.
Continue to:
My Books
