Healthy Happy Holidays
Helping You Through The Holidays
Artificial Sweeteners
What are they?
Artificial sweeteners—also called sugar substitutes—are compounds that offer the
sweetness of sugar without the same calories. They are 30 to 8,000 times sweeter
than sugar! Many have zero calories per gram. In the U.S. 5 artificially derived sugar
substitutes have been approved for use—saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, neotame,
and acesulfame potassium.
Succharin
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300-500 times as sweet as sugar
It has a bitter after-taste
Often used to improve the taste of toothpaste, dietary foods, and
dietary beverages
There is some controversy over the cause of bladder cancer due to saccharin
consumption
Aspartame
• It is 200 times as sweet as sugar
• It can be used as table-top sweetener or in frozen desserts,
gelatins, beverages, and chewing gum
• It might not taste exactly like sugar because it reacts with other flavors in food
• Initial testing has suggested that aspartame causes brain tumors; however,
further research has neither proved nor disproved this suggestion
Sucralose
• It is 600 times as sweet as sugar
• It can be used in beverages, frozen desserts, and chewing gum
• Unlike others, it is stable in heat and can be used in baked and fried
foods
• The controversy behind Sucrlose, a.k.a. Splenda, is based on the marketing, not
the safety
• Sucralose is a chlorocarbon (sugar that has been chemically altered by replacing
the 3 oxygen-hydrogen groups with 3 chlorine atoms)
Healthy Happy Holidays
Helping You Through The Holidays
Stevia
• Stevia is a South American shrub whose leaves have been used
for centuries by natives of Paraguay and Brazil as a sweetener
• It has not been approved as a food for use in the US due to a
lack of research on its toxicity (marketed as a dietary
supplement)
• In large doses (about 5,000 packets/day):
o Stevia, and its derivative steviol, have been shown to lower sperm
production in men and cause fewer and smaller offspring in women
o Steviol can be converted into a mutagenic compound, which can lead to
cancer
o It may disrupt the conversion of food into energy
• If Stevia is used sparingly, it isn't a threat to humans; however, wide commercial
use could cause a public health threat, which accounts for it not being approved
in the US
Other Artificial Sweeteners
• Alitame (200 x the sweetness of sugar)
• Cyclamate (30 x the sweetness of sugar)
• Dulcin (250 x the sweetness of sugar)
• Neohesperidine dihydrochalcone (1,500 x sweetness of sugar)
• P-4000 (4,000 x the sweetness of sugar)
• Isomalt (0.45-0.65 x the sweetness of sugar)