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Table of Contents
Introduction
The sweetener saga is an excellent example of how our modern societies are walking on their heads. Sweetener is, by definition, a molecule added in recipes or drinks to replace another molecule, sugar, itself added in these recipes in aberrant quantities. It’s like modifying a car so that it can run with a flat tire, rather than changing the tire.
Justifying the existence of these sweeteners is the subject of multiple studies and multiple marketing campaigns and today we several categories of sweeteners emerged. Those we don’t know much about, those that might not be bad for your health and those that are said to have almost miraculous virtues until they don’t anymore.
The diseases of our modern time
Obesity, together with a plethora of metabolic syndromes including diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, emerged as a major death risk factor at the beginning of the 20th century. Our ancestors were just starting to experiment the “dark side” of rising living standards and sedentarisation, hastily explained by a simple formula: “too much food coupled with too little exercise was leading to excess energy to be stored as fat in the organism”.
However, this basic formula might not summarise a problem, which appears to be far more complex, since this alarming public health concern is still unresolved as we speak. Nonetheless, a fact remains, progress made us fat and sick and we are unsure why.
Sugar needy but also guilty
An obvious suspect in this modern tragedy has been almost immediately identified. Sugar or more specifically fructose was the obvious responsible for this epidemy.
Fructose is a monosaccharide, a carbohydrate in its simplest molecular form. Overall, carbohydrates or carbs are essential for our organism. They represent the greatest energy source of the body. At the same time, taken in large excess, sugar can have a detrimental impact on our health.
Ignoring this obvious paradigm, the food industry started to systematically add some in a wide range of products to “improve” taste and texture, aware of our general preference for sweet food. In consequence, sugar consumption in the population of our fast-developing countries was massively exceeding the 10% of energy daily intake, which represents the actual recommendation of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Confronted with the damages, a heartbroken food industry had to backtrack and remove sugar from their beloved recipes. And because sweet taste was good for business, they did it by progressively replacing added sugar with natural or synthetic sweeteners to reduce the energy intake while keeping sweetness.
The different types of sweeteners
Sweeteners are molecules mostly unrelated to sucrose with a high sweetening power. This sweetening power is calculated compared to the sweetness of sucrose taken as equal to one. As an example, a molecule like Advantame has a sweetening power higher than 20000, which means that it is at least 20000 times sweeter than sucrose.
Sweeteners are classified due to their texture (syrups or powder), their nutritional value (caloric or not) and depending of their origin (synthetic or natural). Sweeteners with a sweet taste but containing no calories or those with an intense sweetening power and therefore used at very low concentration are the most popular in the industry as a “healthy” replacement to sucrose.
Safety and conditions of usage of sweeteners in the food industry is controlled by public authorities. However, studies to determine if a molecule can increase cancer risks are often complex and slow in comparison with the abundance of new identified sweeteners knocking on the door to have a chance to end up on our plates. And I will not even mention here, all the scientific studies paid by the food industry itself to demonstrate the safety of their new mouth-watering product. Consequently, all these sweeteners are safe to end up in our menus until they are not.
Non-caloric sweeteners, the example of aspartame
Aspartame is an artificial sweetener around 200 times sweeter than sucrose, with a calorific value at doses necessary to provide a sweet taste close to zero. Aspartame has been discovered in 1965 by James M. Schlatter and entered the market in 1981. It is still widely used in the food and pharmaceutical industries today, even if its safety remains controversial.
Almost 60 years after its discovery, it is still unclear whether aspartame is the direct cause of disease. Connections between aspartame consumption and diabetes, obesity levels, glucose and insulin tolerance may exist. It might also cause several mental disorders and is correlated with autism in children. However, none of the performed studies is categoric enough to induce the exclusion of aspartame from the transformed product available to us.
Without spoiling the last chapter of this article, a first question can come to mind after all this inconclusive scientific work. What is the point to include into our diet an artificial molecule, which has not been in it for around 200,000 years that humanity exists and which might be safe to eat?
Stevia: a natural sweetener with promising healthy properties
Very few natural sweeteners received official approval to be put on the market. Among them, Stevia or Steviol glycoside is the one with the most promising health benefits. Stevia is extracted from the leaves of a perennial shrub called Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni also known as sugarleaf native to part of Brazil and Paraguay. It was already used centuries ago by local population the Guarani people for its sweetness, in tea and as a medicine. More than 40 steviol glycosides have been identified so far.
The steviols which are extracted from the leaves have a sweetening power up to 450-fold higher than sucrose. They can’t be broken through enzymes found in saliva and gastric secretions and will be eventually hydrolysed by Bacteroides in the intestine. Steviols will be absorbed via the portal vein and will reach the liver to be metabolized to steviol glucuronide, before to be eliminated in the urine.
Numerous benefits to human health have been associated with Stevia including anticarcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, antihypertensive, antioxidant and antimicrobial. To summarise, Stevia is antieverything.
Putting together such a long list of benefits associated with a “natural” product should incline consumers to buy stevia-complemented food without thinking too much. But is it really the all story? By focussing on the direct effects of sweeteners for our health are we not missing other aspects and in particular the complex relationship between sugar and our body?
Sugar is not just a nutrient
The multiplication of non-caloric alternative to sugar on the market is not correlated to a reduction in the rate of obesity in our occidental populations. In fact, we observe exactly the opposite. This “interesting” paradox has kept the scientific community on their toes for a number of years and some important clues are now progressively emerging.
Sucrose tastes sweet to human. It tastes sweet because it activates taste receptors initially identified in the mouth which contains taste buds, the sensory organs of the taste. Activation of these receptors releases neurotransmitters to provide taste information to the brain, which will in return, promotes the appropriate response. Do I want to eat this or not?
In the last decade, these sweet taste receptors have been identified everywhere throughout the body, including within the central nervous system and the gut, where it participates to the release of satiation hormones.
Sweeteners, caloric or non-caloric, also bind to sweet receptors. This is basically the reason why they are identified as sweeteners. Each sweetener binds to these receptors with different affinities and can trigger complex and specific cellular responses.
So, overall, the possibilities for a specific sweetener to mess up with our normal physiological functions are far from negligible and in addition, these biological mechanisms are so complex to decipher, that it would take years before the harmfulness of a specific product might be evidenced. As written above, a product is safe until it isn’t.
Why should we need added-sweeteners in the first place?
Sweeteners are highly diverse in term of chemical formula and the observed impact of one on our organism is not necessarily valid for another. Nevertheless, they have in common the capacity to interact with the sweet taste receptors all over our body.
Sucralose, the most used low-calorie artificial sweetener used worldwide, has been shown to alter normal glucose metabolism including insulin sensitivity, the enzyme controlling the level of glucose in the blood and might contribute to the development of heart diseases. It could be caused by interaction with sweet taste receptors in the pancreas and intestine as well as via an alteration of the composition of gut microbiota.
Looking at stevia, our promising natural sweeteners, it has also been shown to impact on gut microbiota, an essential part of our digestive system, and because of its bitter aftertaste is often blended with other sugars and artificial sweeteners. Consequently, stevia-containing products might be capable of raising blood glucose levels.
Finally, these sweeteners perpetuate the desire for sweet-tasting foods and drinks, which will influence our nutritional habits. Addiction to sugar has never been proved in humans but in rodents, sugar can be more addictive than cocaine. Even without being addictive, excess of sugar triggering dopamine-dependent reward circuitry in the brain, encourages food intake beyond its necessary requirement, a mechanism observed with non-caloric sweeteners.
Altogether, for healthy individuals, including added sweeteners in their diet, has no other justification than the “good” taste and come with obvious risks. It could be argued than life without this little sweet pleasure is not as enjoyable. However, it could also be argued the opposite. Personally, I used to be unable to drink coffee without sugar. But I stopped anyway and today, I find sugary coffee, disgusting. This feeling is very common among people who stopped to add sugar in tea, coffee, yogurt and all the food, we tend to like sweeter than necessary.
So instead of moving from sugary drink, to zero sugar drink, why not going for water? This way, you don’t have to worry about the next study suggesting that your favourite low-caloric sweetener increase the risk of cancer and you will be sure to include in your diet the healthiest of all beverage.
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