Sweet from nature – the sweet jouney (part 5 of 6)

In the pre­vi­ous arti­cle, we left behind sug­ars, sug­ar alco­hols, and oth­er bulk sweet­en­ers behind us and we now set the course towards high-inten­si­ty sweet­en­ers. The first we encoun­tered was arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers. They were no good, so we left their chem­i­cal world and con­tin­ued into the wild.

Back to nature

Ordinary sug­ar types can be extract­ed from plants by chop­ping and steep­ing them, fil­ter­ing the decoc­tion and final­ly refin­ing the sug­ar. The most obvi­ous exam­ple is reg­u­lar sug­ar (sac­cha­rose) which is extract­ed from sug­ar beets or sug­ar cane.

But sug­ar is not the only sweet sub­stance that can be extract­ed from plants in the same or a sim­i­lar man­ner. The plant king­dom con­tains many oth­er sweet substances.

One exam­ple is osladin, which is 500 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar and is found in the rhi­zomes of the fern poly­pody.

Another is mogro­sides, 300 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar, found in monk fruit of the Chinese plant luo han guo, which belongs to the same fam­i­ly as cucum­ber and melon.

A third exam­ple is brazzein which is 2,000 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar and is extract­ed from the fruit of the West African climb­ing plant oubli.

But none of these is yet approved in the EU: But, two oth­er sweet sub­stances from plants are.

High intensive sweet substances from natural sources

For foods sold with­in the EU, there are as yet only two approved high-inten­si­ty sweet sub­stances from nat­ur­al sources.

Steviol gly­co­sides (E 960) are twelve close­ly relat­ed sub­stances which are 200–350 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar and that are extract­ed from the ste­via plant. Except for the ste­vi­ol gly­co­side Rebaudioside M (often abbre­vi­at­ed as Reb M), they have, to a vary­ing degree, a bit­ter taste and metal­lic after­taste. Reb M is almost iden­ti­cal in taste to sug­ar, except the fact that it’s 350 times sweet­er. But the most com­mon­ly used ste­vi­ol gly­co­side is so far Rebaudioside A (abbre­vi­at­ed as Reb A).

Thaumatin (E 957) is about 2,000 to 3,000 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar and is extract­ed from the West African plant katemfe. It gives a long-last­ing sweet­ness with a liquorice-like after­taste. Thaumatin can also be used as a flavour enhancer in some foods.

Almost there

Steviol gly­co­sides and thau­matin sounds too good to be true: sweet­ness with­out calo­ries, with no effect on the blood sug­ar lev­el, and from sub­stances from a nat­ur­al source. Have we final­ly hit the jackpot?

No, sor­ry…

The prob­lem with high-inten­si­ty sweet sub­stances is pre­cise that they are high-inten­si­ty sweet. For exam­ple, a mere three grams of ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides will give the same sweet­ness as a kilo­gram of reg­u­lar sug­ar. So, if you replace a kilo­gram of sug­ar with three grams of ste­vi­ol gly­co­side, what do you replace the remain­ing 997 grams in the prod­uct with?

It is very rarely pos­si­ble to sim­ply remove the reg­u­lar sug­ar and replace it with just ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides. Something else must be added to com­pen­sate for the vol­ume and struc­ture that reg­u­lar sug­ar brings to a prod­uct. The sug­ar has oth­er prop­er­ties that must be com­pen­sat­ed too. And of course, the taste of reg­u­lar sug­ar is about much more than just sweet­ness. All of which much be replaced.

And if that wasn’t enough, ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides and oth­er high-inten­si­ty sweet­en­ers have flavours of their own that we are not used to. We need to take that into account as well.

This is why it’s not a quick fix to just replace reg­u­lar sug­ar with high-inten­si­ty sweet sub­stances from nat­ur­al sources. Each food or bev­er­age presents indi­vid­ual chal­lenges to find solu­tions that won’t alter the sweet­ness, taste and mouthfeel.

It takes a kind of exper­tise and equip­ment that most don’t have. And it takes time and a lot of money.

So, is there no eas­i­er solu­tion with a short­er time to market?

Yes, there is.

In next arti­cle, which will be the last in this art­cie series, we reach the goal of our jour­ney into the world of sweet­en­ing: The sweet­ened fibres.