Title: Alternative Sweeteners

2 O’Brien Nabors
in humans. This is the first time IARC has considered mechanistic data, and the
IARC panel voted unanimously that saccharin could cause tumors in rats but that
this is not predictive of human cancer (2).
Unfortunately, not all events surrounding sweeteners have been positive.
Although some new technologies have provided a means of supporting the safety
of sweeteners, the Internet has made disseminating negative information without
accountability a new art form.
No adverse health effects related to aspartame have been confirmed, but
this has not stopped its critics. An extremely negative, inaccurate article making
absurd claims about aspartame began circulating on the Internet in late 1998. The
article asserts that aspartame is responsible for any number of ailments, without
supporting data and creating new challenges for industry. Fortunately, many of
the negative claims from this article and other antiaspartame fanatics are so absurd
that the sources are not considered credible by many.
I. THE IDEAL SWEETENER
The search for the perfect sweetener continues, but it has long been recognized
that the ideal sweetener does not exist. Even sucrose, the ‘‘gold standard,’’ is
not perfect and is unsuitable for some pharmaceuticals and chewing gums.
Alternative sweeteners (a) provide and expand food and beverage choices
to control caloric, carbohydrate, or specific sugar intake; (b) assist in weight maintenance
or reduction; (c) aid in the management of diabetes; (d) assist in the
control of dental caries; (e) enhance the usability of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics;
(f) provide sweetness in times of sugar shortage; and (g) assist in the costeffective
use of limited resources.
The ideal sweetener should be at least as sweet as sucrose, colorless, odorless,
and noncariogenic. It should have a clean, pleasant taste with immediate
onset without lingering. The more a sweetener tastes and functions like sucrose
the greater the consumer acceptability. If it can be processed much like sucrose
with existing equipment, the more desirable it is to industry.
The ideal sweetener should be water soluble and stable in both acidic and
basic conditions and over a wide range of temperatures. Length of stability and
consequently the shelf-life of the final product are also important. The final food
product should taste much like the traditional one. A sweetener must be compatible
with a wide range of food ingredients because sweetness is but one component
of complex flavor systems.
Safety is essential. The sweetener must be nontoxic and metabolized normally
or excreted unchanged, and studies verifying its safety should be in the
public domain.
To be successful, a sweetener should be competitively priced with sucrose and
other comparable sweeteners. It should be easily produced, stored, and transported.