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Comment by monkeywork | Hacker News Reader

I've seen the economics talked about a few times in this thread but having no experience at all with the industry - what is the difference between economical and not in actual dollar values?

If you were to produce a KG of this vs say our common art-sweetners what is the cost multipler

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Well keep in mind that stuff like sucralose may be more expensive to make but it's also selected because it's way more potent, so there's a lot of filler (usually cyclodextrin?) To fill out a packet and make a cooking/flavoring equivalent.

Though I'm not 100% sure maybe sucralose is made by enzymatically installing those halogens? I could be very wrong.

Speaking of filler, it seems the experiment in question didn’t control for that? Since there’s so little artificial sweetener is it possible the gut flora are reacting to the filler?

The experiment in the article explicitly does control for this

> The participants (20 per group) were given sweetener packets of aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, or stevia, each bulked out with glucose to an equivalent size, with another group that got just glucose and another group that took no sweeteners at all.

In this experiment, the artificial sweeteners used glucose as the filler. They also account for the effects of the glucose filler on the insulin response in all groups by measuring the difference in the response.

My guess is a minimum of 5-10x more expensive at scale.

Sugar is really cheap, especially if you don’t mind which particular local source you use (sugar cane, corn syrup, etc).

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