Hacker News Reader

Comment by momeara | Hacker News Reader

Here is patent [1].

The key idea is to add a glucosyltransferase from Lactobacillus, which consumes simple sugars and produces complex sugars.

It is not clear to me that this will be beneficial for human health.

[1] https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf;jsessionid...

View on HN

This patent is actually really interesting. Up until now, most exogenous enzyme treatments in food production have been catabolic. This anabolic idea is something I haven't thought would be possible. Table 7 is really the tell-all. Starting with 270g sucrose, the sucrose is converted into Fructose and higher sugars. Only 180g of the sucrose is accounted fo rin that table, meaning the other 90g of sucrose is made into something even higher than they show in the table.

Thanks for digging that up! Incidentally, most of that link is worthless except to follow your path to it; only the docId is needed:

https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...

This! Sugar at least has known side effects. :-/

> Lactobacillus

Chances are, you're already eating them in dairy.

It's not like we understand the 'side effects' of most things we eat. Any plant or fruit or fermented product you eat is made up of thousands of compounds, almost none of which have been tested for their effects in isolation.

(But, you know, I'm pretty confident candy bars are bad for you. This change will not make them any better.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com