Title: Alternative Sweeteners

152 Pearson
manufactured to meet Food Chemicals Codex and U.S. Pharmacopeia/National
Formulary specifications (14a,b). Their properties are listed in Table 1.
Several additional salts of saccharin have been reported. These include silver,
ammonium, cupric, lithium, magnesium, zinc, and potassium. Although all
of these are intensely sweet, none is available commercially. Substitutions on the
nitrogen of saccharin eliminates its sweetness, whereas carbon substitution gives
unpredictable sweetness results (17a,b), although no substituent imparts a greater
sweetness than that of saccharin itself (18).
X-ray crystallography has shown that the acid form of saccharin exists as
dimers formed by hydrogen bonding between the imide hydrogen and the keto
oxygen (19a,b).
V. SWEETENING POWER AND ADMIXTURE POTENTIAL
Saccharin is approximately 300 times as sweet as sugar dissolved in water at 7
wt% concentration. Coupled with sodium saccharin’s low price (approximately
$3.00/lb), this sweetening factor means that a penny’s worth of saccharin has
the sweetening power of 1 pound of sugar. The relative economics of current
commercial sweeteners are compared in Table 2, showing that all the saccharin
forms are by far the least expensive per sweetness equivalent.
In 1921, Paul observed that saccharin’s sweetening power relative to sucrose
increases with decreasing concentration (20). Recent data were used in
Fig. 4, which again demonstrates the dramatic increase in sweetening potency,
relative to sucrose, with decreasing sweetener concentration (1). He found a similar
concentration effect with dulcin, another alternative sweetener used at the
time, but that is no longer approved. Paul made the remarkable observation that
when these two sweeteners are blended, each sweetener retains its higher sweetening
power in the presence of the other. For example, to achieve a sweetness
equal to a 9% sucrose solution, individually 450 mg/l of saccharin or 1250 mg/l
of dulcin is required. But this 9% sucrose solution is also equaled with a blend
containing 190 mg/l of saccharin plus 120 mg/l of dulcin, only 310 mg/l in total.
Individually, the 190 mg/l of saccharin is equivalent to a 6% sucrose solution,
whereas the 120 mg/l of dulcin is equivalent to a 3% sucrose solution. Thus by
blending the two sweeteners, Paul was able to ‘‘add’’ their individual sweetening
equivalencies and achieve the same sweetness with less total sweetener. This
effect is more completely demonstrated by Paul’s data presented in Table 3.
Today, this phenomenon of increasing sweetening power with decreasing
concentration has been established for many sweeteners (21, 22), and additive
effects have been reported for blends of saccharin with several other sweeteners.
In addition, the blend is frequently sweeter than would be predicted by the additive
effect. This enhanced effect is termed ‘‘synergistic.’’ Table 4 lists various