The enzyme that puts branches of glucose on stevia (2019)
cen.acs.org
cen.acs.org
It is naturally occurring at trace levels in some fruits and was first isolated in the 1940s but commercially viable manufacturing methods only became available recently. It’s starting to appear in some low-carb bars, cereals, and ice creams, but it’s still quite hard to find in products.
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed :)
To me tagatose[1] is way more like ordinary table sugar than any other sweetener that I've tried. In fact, it's indistinguishable from sugar to me. It's a real shame it's not more well known.
Their efforts were hampered by some drama — some shady grant fraud involving a key Chinese researcher, with subsequent litigation — which is the premise of the article. But another problem with tagatose, historically, is that it's difficult to scale up the process, which requires processing yeasts with exensive enzymes, to commercial levels. Bonumose claims to have solved that problem, but it's still stuck at the patent licensing stage, from what I can tell.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/11/1048913/inside-t...
GI issues is actually one of the most reported side effects of allulose. It certainly does a number on me. So much so that I ruled it out as an artificial sweetener after trying it a few times, but I guess it might still work for me as a cheap laxative.
We take a can of low sugar peaches or pears, mix in 2tbs of allulose and a pinch of xantham gum, freeze it and then run it through the Ninja Creami and get a quite good sorbet with 120 cal a pint, and super easy to make.
The cooling effects of some of the sugar alcohols, I'm not sure exactly which one, is pretty weird. She made some great cookies that I just wouldn't eat because of that cooling effect. Which makes them even lower calorie. :-)
Does it actually remain calorie free when caramelized? That's a chemical change.
Context - I've been trying to figure out if there are any downsides (besides cost) to using Monk Fruit.
The health effects are largely the same—your body doesn’t do much with these sweeteners, and they’re used in small quantities to begin with. Saccharine was thought to be unsafe after experiments in the 1970s, but the modern consensus post 2000 is that it is, in fact, safe.
Xylitol is the odd one out because it has calories, just 40% less than ordinary sugar. It’s being sold as something with all sorts of amazing health effects—fewer calories, lower glycemic index, etc. Some of these are overstated. I think most of these are overstated. IMO it is more convenient to just eat less sugar. Unlike most sweeteners, you can bake with xylitol, more or less. Some people find it irritates their stomach.
Stuff like sucralose and stevia are convenient and easy to source. YMMV, the only reason I’m having an artificial sweetener to begin with is because it’s in a factory product like soda or chewing gum, so I’m stuck with whatever the choice is off the shelf. If I’m cooking or baking, I look for recipes that use less sugar to begin with or I just eat less of the final product.
They had to take him to the vet where they fed him charcoal and pumped his stomach. =-/
I'm not talking about synthetic stevia as I haven't encountered such.
As far as taste goes, I have no complaints, but I'm also pretty easy to please. I tend to use dissolved sucralose in things that don't get mechanically mixed, and I don't mind that taste at all.
I don't think any of the ones that people still use today have any sort of health problems. Not like maltitol, the famous sugar-free gummy bear sweetener which made everyone crap (or whatever sweetener was in those fat-free chips that was the real culprit behind people's digestive trouble, not the olestra).
In general you can eat them safely, most of the studies showing their negative effects are poorly conducted inconclusive experiments (asparthame especially). The other half shows adverse reactions in mice, which have a very different digestion.
The point of sweeteners is that you do not digest them, they leave your body with the same structure they had when they entered.
I would avoid stevia though, I think it's the one more controversial and it's only pumped because it's extracted from a natural plant rather than sythesized.
"Sweeteness" isn't an absolute chemical property of a molecule, it's about the capacity of a molecule to bind with our sweet receptors inside our mouths and the neural response our brain receives.
Sweeteners generally have much higher capacity of binding with our sweet receptors, thus they produce a stronger electrical signal towards our brain. Afaik the relative sweeteness is calculated by diluting glucose and sweetener X in a glass of water and then calculating the amount of one compared to the other.
E.g. If you need 0.05 grams of a sweetener to obtain the same effect of 1 gram of sugar then it's 20 times more sweet.
Every chemical reaction is in an equilibrium between reagents (R) and products (P). Products consistently transform in reagents and viceversa, and the equilibrium (more reagent or more product) depends on the relative energy levels.
It's like going from a valley to another one, the lower valley will determine if you have more reagent (R) or product (P).
But to go between the two valleys there is a mountain. The mountain does not determine whether you will have more P or R, but it determines how much energy (of various forms) to go from valley of reagents to valley of products. Sometimes the mountain between the valleys is so high that no reactions occur or they occur at such a small speed that you will see no difference.
Simple example: diamond and graphite. Graphite is MUCH more stable than diamond, because it's energy level is much lower than the one of a diamond. BUT there is a very high mountain between the two forms, thus it takes millions of years for a diamond to transform into graphite and you don't see your jewelry turning into pencils (even though, eventually it will).
What catalysts do is that they basically lower the mountain: the reactions from R to P and P to R become much faster, now I can go from valley to valley with ease.[1]
This means that you can chemically engineer new sweeteners, potentially much more sweet. This is good for the producer (needs less sweetener) but also for the consumer (taste is the same, but eats less sweetener).
[1]https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...
So the sweet compound is not the enzyme, but "diterpenoids called stevioside and rebaudioside A" which are small molecules. Well small-ish, as you can see:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/searchId.do?chebiId=CHEBI:9271
with a formula of C38H60O18 it is 4-5 times the size of a glucose molecule.
Is this another Phenylketonuria problem?
A certain percentage of people get a bitter taste from stevia. Kind of like how a certain percentage of people get a soapy taste from cilantro.
And, as it just so happens, cilantro does taste like soap to me, and I have been a subscriber to nocilantro.com for many years.
And so now, I've been wondering if there's a similar problem with Stevia, where I am again affected negatively. And so I mentioned phenylketonuria as the poster child for that pattern.
Maybe I need to see if there is a nostevia.com domain that I can subscribe to, or create one if not?
Anything with aspartame in it seems to make me immediately feel nauseous. Not sure if I’m an outlier here.
I mix some into a big jar of whey protein, close it up and mix well. That way i can get my preferred brand of protein with no additives to have just enough sweetness to be palatable when combined with some blueberries and dates.