ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS: - University of Maryland

Animals love the taste of sweet. From humans with their “sweet tooth” down to the
smallest vole hunting for the garden bulbs, it has been said that this craving is due to our
natural instinct to search and find food. (1) Sweetness implies there are calories: calories
to sustain our body through various activities and environments. Most of those calories
come from carbohydrates and lipids (fats and oils). Proteins as well as carbohydrates
contain four calories per gram, whereas fats contain nine calories per gram. (2) The
reason why then we take in more calories from carbohydrates than proteins is due to the
fact that we consume much more in volume of those carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are
molecules that come in a variety of sizes and resulting function. “The smallest
carbohydrates are the simple sugars, also known as monosaccharides and disaccharides.”
(3) The commonly referred to sugar is table sugar, or sucrose, which is a disaccharide.
Sucrose consists of two monosaccharides: glucose and fructose.
Figure 1. Sucrose molecule (3)
Fructose can be found solo in fruits, and glucose will form polysaccharides (also referred
to as complex carbohydrates) e.g. starch found in potatoes, beans and other fibrous
vegetables. (4) Glucose is very important in our diet, as it is the starting block of nearly
all energy derivation/mechanism in mammals.