Monster sugars — The Sweetening Journey (part 3 of 6)

Our sweet jour­ney con­tin­ues. We have left sug­ars and sug­ar alco­hols behind, and have now arrived at the third stop. Here we find a colour­ful mix of high­ly processed, sug­ar-like prod­ucts. We’re talk­ing about glu­cose syrup, isoglu­cose, invert sug­ar, and the like.

Bulk sweeteners

Ingredients that are about as sweet as sug­ar and that takes up about the same amount of vol­ume are some­times called bulk sweet­en­ers. Sweeteners, as they bring sweet­ness to the prod­uct. Bulk, as they, just like sug­ar, have a rel­a­tive­ly low sweet­ness in rela­tion to their weight and vol­ume and is there­fore need­ed in larg­er amounts.

The sug­ar types and sug­ar alco­hols we have already looked at in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle are exam­ples of bulk sweet­en­ers. But there are more of them. The remain­ing ones are pro­duced indus­tri­al­ly through chem­i­cal process­es in which starch or sug­ar is trans­formed into some­thing sim­i­lar to sug­ar or syrup. In this arti­cle, we will look clos­er at four of them.

Glucose syrup is also known as just glu­cose. It’s a liq­uid blend that gets its sweet­ness from glu­cose, mal­tose and mal­todex­trin, which are all the result of split­ting starch. Sometimes fruc­tose is added to increase the sweetness.

Glucose-fruc­tose syrup is a glu­cose syrup with more than 5 per cent added fruc­tose but with more glu­cose than fruc­tose. Not to be con­fused with fruc­tose-glu­cose syrup.

Isoglucose is also called fruc­tose-glu­cose syrup, high fruc­tose corn syrup, or HFCS for short. It’s a liq­uid blend of glu­cose, fruc­tose and mal­todex­trin, pro­duced by split­ting starch to glu­cose syrup and then turn­ing mal­tose to fructose.

Invert sug­ar is a liq­uid blend of glu­cose and fruc­tose, pro­duced from reg­u­lar sugar.

Glucose syrup

Glucose syrup is pro­duced from starch, which often comes from pota­toes, wheat or corn.

Starch is chains of glu­cose mol­e­cules. By dis­solv­ing starch in water and adding acid or enzymes, or both, and heat­ing the blend, starch is bro­ken down into small­er chains of glu­cose mol­e­cules (mal­todex­trin) which in turn is bro­ken down into even small­er ones, and so on. This is called hydrol­y­sis.

The result is glu­cose syrup – a blend of glu­cose, mal­tose (two glu­cose mol­e­cules) and mal­todex­trin. Glucose syrup can thus be described as the result of hydrol­y­sis of starch.

The qual­i­ty of the glu­cose syrup is cal­cu­lat­ed as a per­cent­age by mass of the dry mat­ter. This per­cent­age is called dex­trose equiv­a­lent (DE).

Complete hydrol­y­sis turns all starch into glu­cose (DE = 100) but also gives rise to bit­ter degra­da­tion prod­ucts. Glucose syrup is most com­mon­ly used with DE = 42 and DE = 70. To be termed gly­cose syrup DE must be at least 20. At below 20, it is referred to as mal­todex­trin.

Glucose syrup is used more and more as it’s cheap­er than sug­ar. It is also used to pre­vent crys­talli­sa­tion of reg­u­lar sug­ar, to increase vis­cos­i­ty and to pre­serve moisture.

Glucose-fructose syrup

Glucose is less sweet than reg­u­lar sug­ar. To com­pen­sate this there is a glu­cose syrup with added fruc­tose, which is sweet­er than reg­u­lar sugar.

If the glu­cose syrup con­tains more than 5 per cent fruc­tose but the lev­el of glu­cose is larg­er than the lev­el of fruc­tose, the result is called glu­cose-fruc­tose syrup. All count­ed as dry matter.

Isoglucose (fructose-glucose syrup)

Glucose syrup is also the start­ing point for the pro­duc­tion of isoglu­cose, also known as fruc­tose-glu­cose syrup. Isoglucose which is pro­duced from starch from corn is called corn syrup, or HFCS (high fruc­tose corn syrup).

The pro­duc­tion of isoglu­cose starts with starch which is hydrol­ysed with acid and two dif­fer­ent kinds of enzymes. The result is glu­cose syrup, to which enzymes are added which cause the atoms to realign so that the glu­cose turns into fruc­tose. This is called iso­meri­sa­tion.

The result is an isoglu­cose which con­sists of 42 per cent fruc­tose, 50–52 per cent glu­cose and 6–8 per cent maltodextrin.

With high-per­for­mance liq­uid chro­matog­ra­phy, the lev­el of fruc­tose can be con­cen­trat­ed to 90 per cent. This is rarely used in foods.

Finally, you can blend a 42 per cent isoglu­cose and a 90 per cent isoglu­cose to a blend with 55 per cent fruc­tose. This blend is most sim­i­lar to sug­ar in sweet­ness. It’s used in for exam­ple sodas.

Invert sugar

Invert sug­ar is also a blend of glu­cose and fruc­tose. It’s pro­duced in a sim­i­lar way to glu­cose syrup but starts with reg­u­lar sug­ar instead of starch.

Regular sug­ar has mol­e­cules that are com­posed of glu­cose and fruc­tose. By dis­solv­ing sug­ar in water and adding acid, enzymes, or both, and heat­ing the blend, the sug­ar is bro­ken down into glu­cose and fructose.

The result is invert sug­ar, con­sist­ing of 50 per cent glu­cose and 50 per cent fruc­tose. Invert sug­ar can thus be described as the result of hydrol­y­sis of reg­u­lar sugar.

Invert sug­ar is indus­tri­al­ly pro­duced as a 65–73 per cent aque­ous solution.

Invert sug­ar is just as sweet as reg­u­lar sug­ar, but it has a bet­ter preser­v­a­tive func­tion than sac­cha­rose. It’s also used to con­trol crys­talli­sa­tion in sug­ar con­fec­tionery products.

Worse than regular sugar

Glucose syrup and isoglu­cose are cheap­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar. Invert sug­ar is more expen­sive but has a bet­ter preser­v­a­tive func­tion, lim­its crys­talli­sa­tion and has anoth­er few aces up its sleeve. So that makes bulk sweet­en­er bet­ter than reg­u­lar sug­ar, doesn’t it?

Absolutely not!

From a health per­spec­tive, they are even worse than reg­u­lar sugar.

Strictly, glu­cose syrup has the same num­ber of calo­ries as reg­u­lar sug­ar, but as glu­cose syrup only has 30–60 per cent of the sweet­ness of reg­u­lar sug­ar, you need up to 2.5 times more glu­cose syrup than sug­ar to get the same sweet­ness. This means 2.5 times more calories.

When it comes to GI it gets even worse. Glucose syrup con­sists prac­ti­cal­ly exclu­sive­ly of the two reg­u­lar sug­ar types which have a high­er GI than reg­u­lar sug­ar. Glycaemic index for glu­cose is 138 and for mal­tose 150. That’s 50 and 63 per cent respec­tive­ly, high­er than reg­u­lar sugar.

Isoglucose and invert sug­ar are both a blend of about equal parts glu­cose and fruc­tose – just like reg­u­lar sug­ar. But where reg­u­lar sug­ar is digest­ed in your body, isoglu­cose and invert sug­ar are digest­ed in the fac­to­ry. The glu­cose and fruc­tose are freed and can eas­i­ly be digest­ed by the body, where they will increase the blood sug­ar lev­el and turn into fat, respectively.

‘Monster sugars’

More and more con­sumers are avoid­ing high­ly processed bulk sweet­en­ers. It’s not the high lev­el of pro­cess­ing that goes into pro­duc­ing them that is the scari­est part, but new research that in media is pre­sent­ed as alarm­ing reports on ‘mon­ster sugars’.

Terrifying stuff! Let’s keep looking.

In our next arti­cle, the jour­ney con­tin­ues. Then we will look at arti­fi­cial sweeteners.

Don’t miss the oth­er arti­cles in the Sweetening Journey collection!