The difficult art of sugar reduction

The aver­age Swede eats about 37 kilos of added sug­ar a year. That’s 100 ml of sug­ar – a day! Way too much says the World Health Organization (WHO), and rec­om­mend less than 30 ml of added sug­ar per day. Preferably even less.

Carrot and stick

Too much sug­ar increas­es the risk of over­weight and obe­si­ty, which are known risk fac­tors when it comes to insulin resis­tance, dia­betes, high blood pres­sure, high lev­els of cho­les­terol, triglyc­erides and oth­er blood fats, and car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease. Added sug­ar is sim­ply not good for health. Therefore, there is both con­sumer demand and reg­u­la­to­ry pres­sure on food and bev­er­age pro­duc­ers to reduce added sugar.

Consumers are aware of the dan­ger of sug­ar and are increas­ing­ly demand­ing foods with less sugar.

Governments and author­i­ties around the world require the same. The United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Hungary, Norway and more than twen­ty oth­er coun­tries, and many of the US states, have there­fore intro­duced a sug­ar tax.

So with both car­rot and stick, in the form of demand and reg­u­la­tions, one might think that the food and bev­er­age indus­try should be moti­vat­ed to reduce added sug­ar in foods. But it’s not that sim­ple. (Of course.)

The challenge

Sugar tastes good. It also pro­vides vol­ume and tex­ture. So you can’t just remove sug­ar. It must be replaced by some­thing else. This is the chal­lenge that holds back the food and bev­er­age indus­try despite both car­rot and stick.

At Bayn, we have tak­en on that chal­lenge. We have researched and devel­oped a solu­tion that we call sweet­ened fibres. And that’s pre­cise­ly what it is. Dietary fibres coat­ed with sweet­en­ers. They have few­er calo­ries than reg­u­lar sug­ar, or no calo­ries at all, depend­ing on the application.

But before we go into how sweet­ened fibres can be used to reduce added sug­ar and emp­ty calo­ries, let’s make a ‘sweet­en­ing jour­ney’ and explore what oth­er alter­na­tives are available.

Sweet ingredients

At the first stop of the sweet­en­ing jour­ney, we inves­ti­gate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of replac­ing added sug­ar with ‘nat­ur­al sugars’.

The sim­plest trick in the school book is, of course, to replace the added reg­u­lar sug­ar, glu­cose syrup, or the like, with ingre­di­ents that have a nat­ur­al con­tent of grape sug­ar and fruit sug­ar, for instance, fruit, hon­ey and juices). If all the added sug­ar is removed in this way, the prod­uct is ‘with­out added sug­ar’. Problem solved.

Or?

No! It is not the sug­ar itself that is harm­ful, but the unnec­es­sary calo­ries that sug­ar adds. If the sug­ar replace­ment does not con­tain a sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er amount of calo­ries, noth­ing is gained.

Despite this, there are food and bev­er­age pro­duc­ers who use this trick. Therefore, the EU con­sid­ered it nec­es­sary to explic­it­ly pro­hib­it mar­ket­ing with terms such as ‘with­out added sug­ar’ and the like when non-sug­ar ingre­di­ents are used main­ly to give sweetness.

The first stop on the sweet­en­ing trip was a dis­ap­point­ment. Let’s continue.

Sugar alcohols

At the next stop, we meet names that are famil­iar to most: sor­bitol, xyl­i­tol, malti­tol and a hand­ful of oth­ers who whose names end with –ol. These are com­mon­ly called sug­ar alco­hols. Despite the name, one doesn’t become drunk of them. But they do taste sweet.

Typical for most sug­ar alco­hols is that they con­tain 40 per cent few­er calo­ries than sug­ar. On the oth­er hand, most of them are not as sweet either. So to get the same sweet­ness with only sug­ar alco­hol, more is need­ed, and then not much is won.

In addi­tion, all sug­ar alco­hols cause flat­u­lence. And at an exces­sive amount, they have a lax­a­tive effect. Therefore, foods con­tain­ing 10 per cent or more of sug­ar alco­hols must have a warn­ing text. Not too fun to read as a consumer.

Despite these faux pas, sug­ar alco­hols are use­ful in reduc­ing sug­ar. However, they can rarely replace sug­ar straight up and down. It would cause all the above prob­lems. But they can be part of the solu­tion – which we will see later.

We leave the sug­ar alco­hols behind us and con­tin­ue the sweet­en­ing journey.

Artificial sweeteners

Sugar has a rel­a­tive­ly low sweet­ness in rela­tion to its calo­ries. The same goes for sweet ingre­di­ents, sug­ar alco­hols and oth­er so-called bulk sweet­en­ers.

Bulk sweet­en­ers are named so because they pro­vide both sweet­ness and bulk (fill a vol­ume). This is where their prob­lems lie. To get the desired sweet­ness, a large amount of bulk sweet­en­er is need­ed, and with large amount fol­lows many calories.

The obvi­ous solu­tion is to find sub­stances that are sig­nif­i­cant­ly sweet­er than sug­ar in rela­tion to the amount of calo­ries. One such sub­stance is aspar­tame.

One hun­dred grams of sug­ar con­tains 400 kcal. Aspartame con­tains as many calo­ries. But since it is 200 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar, it is enough with only 0.5 grams of aspar­tame to achieve the same sweet­ness. This means that aspar­tame is need­ed in such small quan­ti­ties that in prac­tice, the amount of calo­ries is negligible.

Aspartame does not taste like sug­ar. Neither does Acesulfame K, which is 130–200 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar. But togeth­er the taste becomes quite sugary.

Another chem­i­cal with a sug­ar-like taste is sucralose. It’s made from ordi­nary sug­ar by replac­ing three oxy­gen-hydro­gen pairs with chlo­rine atoms. The result is 500-600 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sugar.

However, there is a big crux with arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers: Consumers dis­like them.

To para­phrase Mowgli and Baloo in the Jungle Book: ‘You eat chem­i­cals?! You bet­ter believe it. And you’re gonna love the way they tick­le.’ Most con­sumers don’t. Let’s con­tin­ue our sweet­en­ing journey.

Plant-based sweeteners

The path mapped out is right. To get sweet­ness and lose calo­ries, we must have a high-inten­si­ty sweet­en­er. But to get the consumer’s approval, we must leave the chem­i­cal­ly pro­duced sub­stances and inves­ti­gate what is in nature. There are a lot, it turns out.

A high-inten­si­ty sweet sub­stance found in nature is osla­dine. It is 500 times sweet­er than reg­u­lar sug­ar. If you have spent some time in the for­est, you have sure­ly seen the plant that pro­duces the sub­stance. Maybe you’ve tast­ed it too. The sub­stance is in the root­stalk of the wall fern (com­mon polypody).

But osla­dine is not allowed in food and bev­er­age. Not because it is dan­ger­ous, but because there are no finan­cial inter­ests that have fund­ed the exten­sive stud­ies that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) requires to approve nov­el food.

There is only one sweet­en­er of nat­ur­al ori­gin approved in the EU for gen­er­al use in food and bev­er­age – ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides found in the plant stevia.

That’s good! Steviol gly­co­sides pro­vide sweet­ness as nat­u­ral­ly as sug­ar but with­out calo­ries. We must have reached the goal of the sweet­en­ing journey?

Sorry…

Trouble in paradise

The prob­lem with high-inten­si­ty sweet­en­ers is pre­cise that they are high-inten­si­ty sweet. For exam­ple, a mere three grams of ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides give the same sweet­ness as one kilo­gram of reg­u­lar sug­ar. But what should the oth­er 997 grams be replaced with?

It is rarely pos­si­ble to sim­ply remove sug­ar and add ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides. Something more needs to be added to com­pen­sate for the vol­ume and tex­ture of the sug­ar. The sug­ar also has oth­er prop­er­ties that may need to be com­pen­sat­ed. And of course, we have the taste of sug­ar, which is much more than just sweet­ness. Everything has to be replaced.

And that would not be enough: Steviol gly­co­sides and oth­er high-inten­si­ty sweet sub­stances have their taste that we are not used to. We also need to take that into account.

Therefore, it is far from easy to replace sug­ar with ste­vi­ol gly­co­sides (or for that mat­ter some oth­er high-inten­si­ty sweet sub­stances). Each appli­ca­tion requires exten­sive and thor­ough test­ing of dif­fer­ent solu­tions to not change the sweet­ness, taste and tex­ture. It requires exper­tise and equip­ment that many com­pa­nies lack, and it takes a long time and costs much money.

Sigh!

Is there no sim­ple solu­tion? Well, there is. Sweetened fibres.

Sweetened fibres

Our sweet­en­ing jour­ney ends where we began – with the chal­lenge of the food and bev­er­age indus­try to replace sug­ar with­out chang­ing its vol­ume, tex­ture or taste. This is a chal­lenge that we at Bayn have tak­en on. And we have found a solu­tion we call sweet­ened fibres.

We have devel­oped a man­u­fac­tur­ing method that makes it pos­si­ble to cre­ate sug­ar-like par­ti­cles of dietary fibres, high-inten­si­ty sweet­en­er (for exam­ple, from ste­via) and oth­er raw mate­ri­als that togeth­er pro­vide the desired properties.

This is where the sug­ar alco­hols return. They often play an essen­tial role in get­ting the right prop­er­ties of sweet­ened fibres.

Our man­u­fac­tur­ing method, for which we have applied for a patent, allows us to pro­duce pow­ders and gran­ules that not only replace sug­ar one-to-one with vir­tu­al­ly unchanged taste and tex­ture but also can be trans­port­ed, stored and han­dled as reg­u­lar sug­ar. This is what we call sweet­ened fibres.

We have devel­oped sweet­ened fibres for a vari­ety of appli­ca­tions, such as bak­ery, choco­late, con­fec­tionery, dairy, soups and sauces, and mar­ket them under the trade­mark EUREBA®.

Turnkey solution

Eureba is a ‘turnkey solu­tion’ for those who want to reduce the risk and time it takes to devel­op a sug­ar-reduced prod­uct. You can start from an exist­ing recipe, or cre­ate a new one with reg­u­lar sug­ar, and then replace the sug­ar, glu­cose syrup or what­ev­er you are using, with a Eureba made for the appli­ca­tion in question.

Of course, we can also help you cus­tomize sweet­ened fibres for your par­tic­u­lar application.

Download e-book

For those who want to relive the sweet­en­ing jour­ney and learn more about the dif­fer­ent alter­na­tives, we have writ­ten a small book that, in six chap­ters, dis­trib­uted on 46 pages, takes you on a jour­ney through the sweet­en­ing land­scape. You get acquaint­ed with var­i­ous solu­tions: sug­ars, sug­ar alco­hol, bulk sweet­en­ers, arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers, sweet­en­ers of nat­ur­al ori­gin and final­ly sweet­ened fibres.

You can down­load it here: https://​www​.bayn​so​lu​tions​.com/​e​n​/​s​w​e​e​t​e​n​i​n​g​-​j​o​u​r​ney.