Microbially produced protein that is much sweeter than sugar | Hacker News Reader

Microbially produced protein that is much sweeter than sugar

nature.com

160 pointswalterbell138 comments

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In summary;

- Sweet protein, 3000x sweeter than sugar

- Same texture/consistency as sugar.

- Can be baked (modified to be temperature stable)

- Unlikely to affect insulin and gut flora.

- Breaks down into common amino acids.

- Produced through fermentation (cheap & scalable).

- Indistinguishable taste profile compared to sugar (according to taste experts)

- May be on the market 2023 (if approved)

Here, take all my money!!

>Here, take all my money!!

Yes, except when something is too good to be true I tends to be very skeptical of it.

While it would great if FDA approves it, I generally take the EU perspective in terms of Food Safety.

At the same time I am also wondering, if this works, may be it is time to tax Sugar?

Multiple countries already tax soft drinks containing sugar.

If it's 3000 times sweeter, you still have to modify your usage of it in a recipe, even if the texture is the same. So your end product might have a different texture because of that quantity difference during the substitution.

Also probably doesn’t damage dna like sucralose/Splenda.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10937404.2023.2...

A lot of the time when I crave sweet things its not for the sweet taste itself that I’m after, but for the sugar itself - e.g. after / during a long day with lots of learning new things / making decisions / tough algorithmic work etc.

I’m after the mood boost that sugar itself provide, the quickening of thinking that you get from it. Eating substitutions for me kinda misses the point, like if they replaced 50% of it, I’ll just need to consume twice the amount to get the same effect.

Also I’ve noticed that at least for me if I live active enough life (cycle to the office) and eat sweets during the day when I actually need it most, I can eat them every day and it will not negatively affect my body. Though I still try to make sure not to do that of course :)

Its just that I honestly don’t get the whole search for sugar replacements. I guess the idea would be that if you’re addicted to sugar, having a substitute would allow you to wane off of it more easily, kinda like a nicotine patch?

But still I would use sugar for its other properties not the sweetness itself, so what would I replace it with?

I’m in the same camp, but I avoid sucrose like the plague because of the fructose content.

Instead I’ll drink a latte (lactose) or eat something like a gummy bear (glucose).

I actually wish someone would make 100% glucose lollies with no added sucrose, but they all seem to have some.

Most drugstores carry all-glucose tablets for diabetics.

What's wrong with fructose? Surely not all fruit is unhealthy.

Fructose is not just in fruit. Table sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose.

In extreme moderation nothing is unhealthy. One drink a week, one cigarette a weak, a teaspoon of sugar a day or one fruit a day are all perfectly fine.

Overconsumption is unhealthy.

Fructose is more unhealthy than glucose because glucose is absorbed by your whole body and fructose by your liver.

Liver is small so it's easier to over tax it. Just like a car engine will fail faster if you drive at max speed all the time, your liver will stop working well if you constantly overload it with processing fructose.

Fructose turns into fat which is deposited in your belly (you get fat / overweight) and in your liver, which is worse.

It leads to fatty liver disease i.e. the fat prevents optimal liver functions which leads to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and other metabolism / autoimmune issues. You're more likely to catch a flu or die from covid.

https://www.vegetariantimes.com/health-nutrition/nutritionis...

The dose makes the poison. The amount of fructose in an Apple is tiny compared to the amount in a Coke.

Less people would be addicted to sugar if the products they ate included less added sugar. Quite simple.

Would they still be less addicted to sugar if we replaced it with artificial sweeteners? Is the addiction to the sugar molecule or to sweetness?

The problem really is overconsumption of glucose which creates overproduction of insulin which over time (years) make you fat (overweight or obese), insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

Diabetes is basically a state of elevated levels of glucose and insulin in your body which fucks up your metabolism.

So addiction to sugar is bad mostly because it causes overconsumption of glucose (sugar is 50% glucose, 50% fructose).

And almost everything you buy in grocery store is loaded with sugar: coke, red bull, cereal, all the sweets, cakes, pastries even things like yogurt or ketchup.

So in theory if if replaced all the sugar in all the products with this thing and it didn't have harmful effects on the body by itself, then we would greatly reduce the consumption of glucose so it stands to reason we would greatly reduce diabetes.

You can still get too much glucose by over consuming carbs (bread, pasta, pizza, rice, tomato, anything with flower) but it's much harder to eat 5 pizzas than to drink 5 liters of coke loaded with sugar.

If you make someone addicted to sweetness, then they will crave sweetness in whatever form they can get. Including real and fake sugars. Quite simple.

Most people are already addicted to that.

It would still be of great benefit to replace sugar with much smaller amount of protein.

Overconsumption of sugar (glucose) leads to diabetes which leads to metabolic / autoimmune issues. Basically it fucks up your body inside.

Overconsumption of protein doesn't fuck up your body and it's much harder to over-eat protein that it is to over-eat glucose.

They won’t necessarily eat fewer calories though. Not least because they will become accustomed to eating very sweet food. My prediction is that this is likely to worsen the obesity epidemic rather than help it. The solutions to overweight are fairly clear at this point. They involve removing the financial incentives for multinational firms to sell us processed food.

There is no reliable definition of processed or ultra-processed food though. Not one you'd recognise: for example under the NOVA system[1] you can get a lot of weird outcomes. For example pasta is a processed food (though also, bad for you - calorie dense).

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1

The carbcandle that burns twice as bright might be only burning half as long?

This thing is a protein, not a carb.

Sugar is glucose and carbs are converted to glucose. Glucose leads to production of insulin. Too much glucose leads to too much insulin production which leads to diabetes. Diabetes is basically "you have too much insulin in your body" disease.

Protein builds your muscles and bones.

Sugar bad. Carb bad. Protein (and fat) good.

This is the nutrition intuition equivalent of someone wearing a continuous glucose monitor and thinking that any time it goes up, it's a horrible thing that must be minimized, even when they're eating a round meal of broccoli, quinoa, and tofu.

You are not their target market.

The average American consumes 17 teaspoons of sugar per day. Because the average American doesn’t like the taste of most processed foods unless it is sweetened significantly.

Look at savory snacks like crackers - even those are loaded with sugar.

Take something like Wheat Thins Tomato and Basil flavor. Sounds savory? A 30g serving has 4g sugar. Yes, a savory snack consisting of 13.3% sugar.

* deleted

Life is a slow (or not so slow, as the case may be) death sentence.

I don't quite get what is the deal with sugar. Those 17 teaspoon are around 50-100g, making around 10-20% of an adults daily caloric intake. That doesn't sound too crazy. Can't you just eat less starchy stuff, after all, that gets broken down to sugar anyway. Or is it that food gets so tasty that people generally eat too much?

I know the statistics point to sugar as being evil incarnate, but I feel there's more wrong with the American cuisine and now sugar gets the blame for all of it.

Personally I eat around 5 teaspoons of sugar a day, mostly in the form of marmalade and ketchup and don't seam to have any adverse effects. Also I guess you'd have to drink sweetened beverages to get to 17 teaspoons, cause at 10 teaspoons a day all my food would be unbearably sweet.

It‘s not “American cuisine”, it‘s overly processed foods. Which exist everywhere. In fact quite a large amount of countries in Western Europe fall squarely 2x over the WHO’s 2015 recommendations at over 100g per day.

I do agree that sugar is taking the blame for the companies selling us these sugary treats. I mean its literally JUST yummy carbs, it’s not like its a carcinogen. And the average person has been so completely numbed by a life of excess sugar that it makes the already predatory food companies push even more sugar in to compete.

It was remarkable to me when I switched to unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter that after about 5 days of it tasting bland, it started tasting amazing.

Since then I've been cutting the sugar in every recipe down to 1/3 to 1/4 of what's specified. You just plain don't need it: at least provided you've largely dropped sugar out of your regular diet (so very limited off the shelf food - which now tastes incredibly sweet to me these days).

The lack of fiber in foods is what makes sugar problematic for a lot of people. Highly processed food gets rid of a lot of that fiber.

Tomato is a fruit. Most fruits have quite a bit of sugar in them. So no, it isn't surprising that tomato soup has sugar in it.

While tomatoes are fruits and some tomato varieties can be quite sweet, a "normal" red tomato is about 5% carbs, 1/3rd of which is fibers.

If your tomato soup is above 10% sugar, a significant amount of sugar was added.

For the wheat thins GP mentions, literally all 4g of sugar are added sugars, per packaging: "total sugars 4g, includes 4g added sugars".

Here is the list of ingredients from the amazon listing:

- wheat flour

- canola oil

- sugar

- cornstarch

- malt syrup

- refiner's syrup

- salt

- leavening

- tomato powder

- sundried tomato powder

- paprika

- garlic powder

- spices

- onion powder

- dried bell peppers

- yeast extract

- natural flavours

- sulfur dioxyde

"Sugar" is literally the third largest ingredient, followed by two syrups at 5 and 6.

That's misleading because most (95%) of a tomato are water. The non-water parts of a tomatoe are 80% sugar, the rest fiber.

> That's misleading because most (95%) of a tomato are water.

So is the vast majority of a tomato soup.

You can literally look at the ingredients list of your can of campbell's or whatever and see sugar as one of the top ingredients.

> You are not their target market.

I’m actually not sure about that.

I feel like there is a significant demographic who (for example) drinks coca cola as a “pick me up” (aka energy boost/mood regulation if they’re addicted).

In my own case, I’m much more likely to get on the sugar train if I have not slept properly and I’m trying to claw my way through the day.

Countries are having huge costs, financial and societal, by having people with diabetes, obesity and dental decay. The concern is not with Bob bringing a banana on a bike ride.

The concern SHOULD be with the food industry that created this problem.

> I’m after the mood boost that sugar itself provide, the quickening of thinking that you get from it.

This is a myth, studies show "sugar rush" is just a placebo. Unless you are diabetic and have low blood sugar, eating sugar will not affect your mood, energy levels, or behavior any more than a placebo

Reminds me of a discussion I had with someone who also ran a 10 miles just like me. He said: "Yeah, at the midpoint I had low energy, but then I ate some dextrose and instantly had energy again".

I thought to myself "You probably should have taken it at the start of the race".

But hey, placebos do work of course, so I didn't want to crush his dream :D.

Can confirm. I am (was) really, really addicted to sweets. I thought I couldn't function without them. Coke Zero/Pepsi Max are doing wonders for me. I'm 40+ years of age, drinking about 2-4 cans a day and went down from 101 kg obese BMI to 79 kg normal BMI in a few months just by removing excess sugar and a little calorie counting. No effort whatsoever, and the zero-free sodas cover most of my "sugar" requirements.

Can you point to the studies please? Would be curious to check them out.

I have experimented quite a lot during the years and sugar (sucrose) for me definitely has positive effect.

I’ve tried tea, other things to eat, even gluten stuff, and sugar sweets was the only thing that made me retain my decision making focus state at the 16:00 lul ours where you still have a few hours to work, but don’t “feel” like it.

When I care more about me than the company’s well being I just accept that I will not be very productive then, but if there is a crunch and I really do care about the project, I can hack it with some sweets.

Maybe it is a placebo, but as long as its not too unhealthy… there are worse ways to live one’s life.

I mean most of the time I would be able to hack it if I really wanted to without sweets. Its just focusing on things gets a lot easier with the sugar. But I do not get overly active if I’m in a stable state, just get more to “normal” when I’ve exhausted my mind with mental work.

If you don’t want to lose the placebo maybe don’t read the studies:)

Sugar is energy to the body, or at least it metabolizes into something that is. It may not affect mood or behavior, but it surely affects energy levels.

Fascinating! I consume zero sugar (not even from fruit) and if I occasionally do, I don't feel different in any way.

When I used to eat sugar I did a few weird things (like drinking squash raw, without mixing it with water, I had no idea I was supposed to do that) but never felt different because of it.

When I was going to sugar was to cope with life / depression. It was kind of an addiction, not unlike alcohol.

> A lot of the time when I crave sweet things its not for the sweet taste itself that I’m after, but for the sugar itself

Now I’m curious (though HN is not the platform for getting closure on this): Have you experimented with consuming the same amount of sugar in capsule form so that you get the dosage with absolutely no mouth sensation?

While we wait for the inevitable news about how this sweetener is harmful, I can't help but think why we don't have a non-controversial sweetener yet. There are hundreds and hundreds of food additives available in the market which are used everywhere. Many of these are compounds not found naturally and new to the human diet. You would expect any safety concerns arising to be sort of uniformly distributed across different classes of additives, purely from a statistical point of view. And yet sweeteners seem to take the brunt of it. What gives?

The sugar industry doesn't like competition?

Isn't stevia non controversial? It's essentially a plant extract.

Personally my problem with sweeteners is twofold. First, they are massively overused (especially in drinks). Second sugar adds more than just sweetness. It thickens the texture a little. I've never encountered this being replicated properly in products that use sweeteners instead.

It's non-controversial but it does not taste like cane sugar, although it is sweet. I wouldn't replace a recipe calling for cane sugar with stevia in most cases. The taste is not the same.

It's also far less studied than sucralose, aspartame, ace-k, and saccharin

just eat some Glycine and Inositol. Sweet like sugar.

Perhaps these are larger volume additives so get better studied. Perhaps a similarly high fraction of all additives would be found harmful if they were more studied, or the studies were easier to run?

>The company has tested sweelin in a range of foods, achieving a 70% reduction in the sugar content of ketchup and a 50% reduction in that of chocolate, for example, without changing palatability.

Why can they not replace 100% of the sugar? For their top line advertisement, feels like there is some gotcha that prevents total sugar substitution.

You often need the chemical properties of sugar to maintain texture. It’s not just a question of flavor or sweetness.

You don’t need sugar for textural reasons for either chocolate or ketchup. It almost surely has to do with taste.

You can get ketchup and chocolate without any sugar at all.

No added sugar, you mean? Tomatoes and cacao both contain natural sugars.

Probably has to do with palatability. Like how full sugar Coke tastes great and zero calorie Coke tastes terrible. The half sugar half stevia Coke tastes better than zero calorie but worse than full sugar. They probably tested each food and detected the inflection point where taste scores started suffering.

Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome of some type after years on the stuff, but I've come to love the taste of zero calorie drinks, and find the originals odd and unpalatable. Hard to explain, it's like they are thicker/syrupy? Even Mexican Coke.

Same here. After years of drinking Coke Zero, I find regular Coke undrinkable.

I belive it's that syrupy thickness people that prefer sugary version like, more than just the sweetness.

Personally, after a long brake from drinking coke/pepsi I can't stand either the original or the zero. I seem to crave the taste sometimes, then I buy one(zero) and it's like "what is this? Why sweetness is literally the only thing that I can taste here?" It feels like they are doubling the sugar in comparison to how I remember it. Most likely it's the same drink, I was just used to the massive sweetener/sugar content before.

FWIW, I prefer the taste of Coke Zero and Pepsi Max to regular Coke/Pepsi.

My wife had never tried Coke Zero before we met and she also prefers it now.

Not sure what they use in these alternatives but Diet Coke/Pepsi taste pretty bad so it must be a starkly different artificial sweetener.

Agreed on zero being better than diet. They actually use the same sweeteners, but a different flavor profile.

FWIW, in the US at least, Pepsi Max also became Pepsi Zero.

I suspect both are getting away from the 'diet' moniker because of the fact that people not on an active weight loss diet prefer them, ruining the played out joke of 'haha he ordered 2 burgers and a diet coke.'

Turns out Diet Coke is actually a different drink. When they made it way back when with the previous genesis artificial sugars it tasted terrible. So they actually re-created the recipe for the fake sugar.

Coke Zero is the same as Coke but with newer generation Artifical sweeteners. That’s why many who like Coke end up not liking Diet but like Zero much better.

Probably because even though it tastes like sugar, it doesn't behave like sugar, which has a more active role in baked goods than as a simple flavoring agent.

https://bakerbettie.com/function-of-sugar-in-baking/

Seems like we have like 800 natural and artificial gums, flours, emulsifiers, etc, some of which are even occasionally considered health food ingredients, and most almost all of which seems healthier than sugar, why not use those for the baking texture if you're going to use the fake sugar for sweetness?

Because those don't give you the same outcome as sugar baked goods.

I urge you to try and bake with any any of those 800 and get a baked good that has a texture like a sugar based good (and doesn't totally crumble apart)

I suspect you slightly under-appreciate how ubiquitous sugars are in nature. Glucose and its close relatives are everywhere in plants. Cellulose, the main building material of plants, is polymerized glucose. A ton of various substances of plant origin are all pre-built to interact with sugars, and may have trouble interacting nicely with severely different kinds of molecules.

With relation to baking and frying, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction works with sugars, and likely can't work adequately with something materially different.

Does Maillard actually do anything aside from the crust? Why couldn't we just put a tiny but of real sugar in the top few mm, by spraying sugar water or just sprinkling on wet batter or dough?

Seems like there are commercial sugar free stuff with an ok texture, but then again maybe I just haven't noticed because the taste of most artificial sweeteners is so bad that it masks it, and I only try them if I accidentally buy something with it...

Sugar substitutes can differ from actual sugar in several ways. The sweetness may take longer to be detected, it may stick around longer (aftertaste), and there may be other, bitter flavors in addition to the sweetness. As others have mentioned, sugar also has various technical roles in food, such as softening baked goods and acting as a preservative.

In addition to health and digestive issue, artificial sweateners normally have 2 significant issues:

1) Taste is about how molecules bind to taste receptors on yhe tongue. Just because a sweatener binds to the sweet receptors, doesn't mean it won't also bind to other receptors. This gives them a different flavor profile than sugar, which needs to be balanced in the overall recipe.

2) Sugar does more than just bind to receptors on your tongue. Mix confectioner's sugar into water and you a glaze. It is still just sugar, but has a distinct look and feel. Or, just coat your confection with powdered sugar directly. It is the same surgar, but produces a completely different sensation in your mouth.

In baking, sugar tends to make food softer. In sauces, it acts as a thickener.

According to this article[1] from 2022 at higher concentrations it has a reduced sweetness response and leaves a lingering sweet taste. Supplementing it with real sugar means they don’t need to go to higher concentrations.

[1] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2022/12/02/Amai-Pr...

I'd like to see more studying on this. I thought all sweet tasting things impacted your body's release of insulin in some regard because of your taste buds in your intestine? There is a lot of conflicting information on this topic overall. Also they told us aspartame was safe because it's just two amino acids, but look at what they're saying now. The production process and purity of the final product matters in some cases more than the actual chemical at hand.

Based on reading comments here, it seems the general overuse of sugar has made people forget that sugar in adequate amounts at appropriate times is good for you. If you have low blood sugar because you just ran five miles, eating sugar — and thus inducing an insulin response which replenishes the energy of your muscle cells — is a good thing.

Sitting on your ass all day eating sugar, however, is not.

This is cool, but I've been using Allulose as sugar has some specific properties (such as rising dough, preservative, etc.) that are pretty important and lost with other properties, and it's low-carb. What's the advantages?

Wouldn't this have the same problem as other non-sugar sweeteners? I think one of the main arguments against Aspartame is that it still invokes an insulin response, so still has a lot of the negative side effects of sugar intake, even if it doesn't have calories.

There is little supported evidence that aspartame causes any meaningful insulin response.

That is pretty neat. I'm hoping for a better future for low carb snacks.

Sounds awful. All of the taste, none of the nutrition. Anything but moderation. We shouldn't be indulging the lack of moderation.

Nothing stopping people from putting it on broccoli.

Folks with inherited diabetes do not have the option of moderation. You don't need to see this through such a narrow political lens. Some fermented nut-based vegan cheeses are healthier for the heart. Should we moan about that invention and insist on dairy based cheese, moderation, and less choice? No one is forcing you to use these new things.

Oh please. You know well this thing, if it works, is going to end up in addictive carbonated sugar water drinks. Except it's not even sugar. Aspartame is a great example. It didn't help with the amount of land whales.

Accusing me of looking through a narrow political lense. How about you look in the mirror.

Drop your last paragraph, it goes against the HN guidelines

I looked in the mirror and stepped on the scale. I'm at a very healthy weight. You sound angry.

Yes but we've seen added sugar to be quite an addictive substance. People want to quit and it's difficult. You will feel the void of sugar. So if there's a healthy alternative that can reduce sugar. It is a highly valuable stepping stone where the success of it would be to make itself unnecessary (although still fun to use!) I think if it's natural and doesn't pose health risks that it sounds great.

The healthy alternative has been here all along: fruits and nuts.

Ah but they are not heavily advertised, so they must be bad :(

I know you mean well but I firmly believe indulging this behaviour is detrimental to society

Indulging what behavior specifically? The use of new ingredients?

Overconsumption.

Why does a new and possibly healthier ingredient need to imply overconsumption?

And what exactly is overconsumption? Isn't it eating more than our body needs? If I eat more of an ingredient that provides fewer nutrients then there is no overconsumption, correct? Or are you looking for a world where we should only eat the most nutrient dense food because of ?

I think that only works with a precondition that sugar substitutes aren't as addictive. That isn't obvious.

yeah good point! although maybe diversity in addiction helps? E.g., instead of being addicted strongly to one substance, you get the desired pleasure from 2 substances... don't know, just a thought

We eat too many carbs you can get nutrition from food without carbs. Just American processed food focuses on salts, carbs and other filler.

Salt is a filler for flavors where spices and herbs can be used because it is cheaper.

Carbs are used because it makes you feel full quick. Where protein will make you feel full after digestion.

America's culture of max min profit is annoying.

Protein isn't a magical satiation macronutrient, else protein shakes would be at the top of the satiety index and potatoes wouldn't be #1.

You're using the word "carbs" as a euphemism for refined grain and sugar. When you say we eat too many carbs, presumably you aren't talking about broccoli. Why not just say refined gains and sugar?

It's like throwing around the word protein when you're talking about wheat gluten.

I think you're confusing proteins and carbs. Dietary fiber yes a carb is not a problem as the body typically does not process dietary fiber. You need some carbs in the diet, but have you ever checked the nutritional label? Sugar is a carb. You really only need so much carbs in your diet and that is about 100g to 200g.

Varying on age gender and genetic heritage.

Everything in moderation, including moderation. You're allowed to live a little once in a while.

I'm not sure artificial sweeteners are good for anything.

A 2019 meta analysis published in the British Medical Journal said, "Most health outcomes did not seem to have differences between the NSS (Non-sugar sweeteners) exposed and unexposed groups." - https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.k4718

A few months ago, "WHO advises not to use non-sugar sweeteners for weight control in newly released guideline" - https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...

My guess is that things tasting sweet is part of the problem. For example:

"Ingestion of these artificial sweeteners (AS) results in the release of insulin from pancreas which is mistaken for glucose (due to their sweet taste). This increases the levels of insulin in blood eventually leading to decreased receptor activity due to insulin resistance." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7014832/

And:

"the role of sweet taste in energy intake and appetite regulation is controversial" - https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/6/9/3431

Respectfully, overstated conclusions you’re drawing from these limited studies.

Ref[1]: Of the few studies identified for each outcome, most had few participants, were of short duration, and their methodological and reporting quality was limited; therefore, confidence in the reported results is limited.

Ref[2] only states NSS should not be used in weight control due to a lack of long term evidence (I.e. if trying to achieve weight control there are better strategies, not necessarily a condemnation) as well as: Because the link observed in the evidence between NSS and disease outcomes might be confounded by baseline characteristics of study participants and complicated patterns of NSS use, the recommendation has been assessed as conditional, following WHO processes for developing guidelines. This signals that policy decisions based on this recommendation may require substantive discussion in specific country contexts, linked for example to the extent of consumption in different age groups.

Ref[2]’s full WHO review article[5] is even more damning on the methodology. Pertinent to your arguments: The results suggest that, in the short term, NSS use may lead to small reductions in adiposity without any significant impact on cardiometabolic risk. There is suggestion of negative health effects with long-term use, but the evidence is ultimately inconclusive.

Ref[3] is obviated by ref[2] and meaningless in isolation, reasons described in the 200 page WHO report.

Ref[4] is theoretical about mechanisms and provides no empiric evidence of anything. Contrary to this hypothesis the WHO study elaborates on why the long-term observational studies are discordant with short-term RCTs and the gist is bias.

[5] https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1417548/retrieve

I guess the way I presented thoughts looked like I was saying NSS are bad for you. I don't have the evidence for that claim. But I don't think the balance of evidence is in favour of NSS either.

I know you can cherry pick health studies to support any argument you like but I don't feel like I've done that. The WHO guidelines/study that we linked to is supposed to be a broad summary of the whole research area. The guidelines document doesn't recommend NSS for anything. It only recommends _against_ using them for things.

> Ref[3] is obviated by ref[2] and meaningless in isolation, reasons described in the 200 page WHO report.

Whereabouts? I couldn't find what you're referring to.

> I guess the way I presented thoughts looked like I was saying NSS are bad for you. I don't have the evidence for that claim. But I don't think the balance of evidence is in favour of NSS either.

Thanks for the clarification, my interpretation of your comment was that you were suggesting that NSS have harmful effects given the insulin discussion.

I agree the evidence is neither for or against NSS harms.

> I know you can cherry pick health studies to support any argument you like but I don't feel like I've done that. The WHO guidelines/study that we linked to is supposed to be a broad summary of the whole research area. The guidelines document doesn't recommend NSS for anything. It only recommends _against_ using them for things.

Agree the WHO review is great and well done. The recommendation against use stems from conflicting evidence and a lack of evidence showing it has the beneficial effects thought to exist. Recommendations like this are generally made to avoid delaying positive interventions rather than a negative statement regarding said intervention.

An analogy would be a position statement to not use bananas for the prevention of breast cancer. It doesn’t mean one shouldn’t eat bananas or that they’re bad for you, it’s just irrelevant and potentially harmful for this indication. Bananas may also still be good for you.

> Whereabouts? I couldn't find what you're referring to.

Apologies I was vague. What I mean is you went backwards down the levels of evidence pyramid.

Once a good quality systematic review is cited it becomes unnecessary to cite substantially weaker evidence (retrospective observational study with self reporting) unless it presents new and compelling information that was not included in the study. Given the study type it’s low-quality and is non-contributory to the conclusions stated in the review.

With respects to reasons described by WHO, I’m referring to the discussion and risks of bias sections. They quite extensively elaborate on the reasons observational studies are poor quality for this question and talks about reasons for conflicting findings between RCTs and observational studies.

Or we could, you know, cap the amount of sugar in products by law or introduce a tax on added sugar. Just seems simpler. Plus it’s working in the EU.

As a sugar addict, I have to say: making my addiction less toxic won't make me less addicted.

Seeing innovations like these warms me up and sweetens my day.

Most American snacks and drinks taste sickeningly sweet. The right thing to do is throw them in the bin.

Eat and drink real stuff instead, with no sugar added. Even an orange joice is naturally extremely sweet.

Note that the reason fruits nowadays are so sweet is because of artificial selection done over millenia - fruits thousands of years ago barely resembled the fruits that we eat today. [0] "Natural" fruit was originally absolute shit for human consumption, so humans have cultivated it until it became abnormally large and rich with sugars. (And orange juice is no more healthier than other competing sugar-fueled junk foods - they all have the dangerously high diabetes-inducing sugar content, and it's not good for your health!)

Don't care if we're using the good-old "manual pollination" technique or high-tech genetic modification - the fact that the crops we eat has been modified extensively until it doesn't resemble the original has been true for the whole existence of human civilization. Nowadays what people call natural "real" food is just a simulacra - a copy of a real thing that doesn't exist anymore. I think people should be more willing to accept this reality if we're going to survive the Anthropocene (with all that climate change jazz) - we as a species have always changed and terraformed Earth and its various flora/fauna throughout millenia, and there is no going back to its original "real" state anymore.

[0] https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/10/infographic-the-drastic...

After humanity dies off or is moribund from the catastrophic effects of global warming, Earth, and its various remaining flora/fauna will revert back to a more natural state, until, after a millennia of healing, it gets unperverted by humanity's touch, and grain and fruit is once again, terrible for human consumption. Which would matter, if there were humans left.

Suicide and omnicide are for the death cult fatalists and the terrorists.

Everyone else I know wants to change things and live.

Sugar is where the body gets energy. Obviously people growing crops for food favor crops that provide the same amount of energy for less work and land.

Orange juice has the exact same amount of sugar as coke, volume for volume.

Juice is not a healthy choice in anyway that really matters and you will get diabetes from it.

Look again. OJ has more calories per unit volume. 13.75 kcal / oz vs. 11.66.

Are you talking about home pressed orange juice or the tetrapaks?

Both. Doesn't matter how you make it: juice is pure sugar.

The Europeans that I know that moved to US always complain about the bread. They can't find any decent bread that isn't sweetened.

Bread is flour, yeast and water. If you add sugar it's brioche.

How do they come with these quantifications that something is 3000 sweeter than sugar. What does that even mean? Cool find though, I hope it works - in the past it's seemed that while you may be able to fool your tongue, your stomach and brain are not so easily fooled.

I'm guessing they mean that it's detectable by humans at a 3000x lower concentration than sugar.

I imagine it's the same way they measure scoville units.

It's sensitivity.

How much of the substance is required for a group of people to consistently correctly guess which of two identical water glasses have been spiked with the substance.

If it's like this then 1/3000 is required compared to sugar.

Maybe they used 1/3000 the quantity of sugar and people rated each sample to be equally sweet.

Edit: it is based on weight compared to sucrose [1], so I happened to be right!

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC549512/

Could be the size of the molecule that will activate the relevant taste receptors, or the number of active molecules in a given volume of product, or given weight.

It’s either 3000x sweeter by volume or number of calories per X amount of sweetness.

I’m pretty sure it’s the latter but it doesn’t seem easy to Google.

It's actually by weight, not by volume.

As a fun note, by calories, aspartame would be infinitely sweeter than sugar, since it has 0 calories.

Just as a point of reference, aspartame is considered to be 150-200x sweeter than sugar.

355ml Coke Cola has 39grams of sugar

355ml Diet Coke has 0.2grams of aspartame

If the new compound was a 1-to-1 replacement, a putative Sweelin Coke would have 0.013grams (13mgs) of sweetener.

"could put a dent in the global metabolic disease and obesity epidemic"

We've had artificial sweeteners for decades, a better one won't make the difference.

Fact that such a statement is still made in a publication in nature and goes unchallenged means that even the scientific community has a fundamentally wrong view on the obesity crisis.

It's not about safeness, it's about taste, cheapness, metabolism and gut. A protein is by far better than a synthetic one on all accounts (apparently).

The point is, why do we think going heavier on the sugar-free product strategy is going to provide any solutions when it's clearly not made a dent in the last 20 years since light products became prevalent?

Even WHO makes such claims: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/15/health/who-sweeteners-wei...

The sugar-free alternatives do not taste like sugar, which is evident from a multitude of blind-studies over the years, this is the first sweetener of this kind that is indistinguishable from sugar in taste and texture.

No one here is making the claim that it should be used for weight loss, that's more of a carbs issue in general - to which we have no substitute yet.

That's the whole point of my comment, and a large part of the article: "could put a dent in the global metabolic disease and obesity epidemic".

So yeah that is what's everyone is claiming.

It might not taste exactly like it, but nothing will. Regardless. Zero alternatives have become a massive market, and im sure many prefer it after while, knowing how human taste develops.

Yes, the article makes a point about it, but that's their own editorializing. The manufacturer makes no such points (yet).

https://amaiproteins.com/

Don't follow your line of arguing, Im pointing to the arguments made by the authors of an article published in Nature. Neither this Article or my comment referred to the motivation of the manufacturer.

You said that’s what “everyone’s” claiming, yet only the article author is

Ban sugar except as a drug sold in pharmacy, problem solved.

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