Sugar : Nonnutritive Sweeteners

by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

(Page 3 of 3)

Nonnutritive, or high-intensity, sweeteners satisfy America's sweet tooth without adding calories. Presently, manufacturers are using three such sweeteners to replace sugar in a variety of food and nonfood items such as mouthwashes and pill coatings.

One of these is saccharin, 300 times sweeter than table sugar and with zero calories. It is sold in liquid, tablets, packets, and in bulk. Saccharin has had a stormy past, with studies in the United States and Canada implicating it in the development of certain cancers. In the late 1970s, FDA contracted with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to study cancer-causing agents and toxic substances in foods, including saccharin. NAS reports showed that saccharin is a potential cancer-causing agent in humans. A congressional moratorium protecting saccharin's continued use has been renewed periodically by Congress. The required label warning on saccharin states, "Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals."

Aspartame - about 200 times sweeter than table sugar and with the same number of calories per teaspoonful has been shown to be safe. However, some people have reported that they are sensitive to it, although such a sensitivity has not been confirmed by scientific studies. Certain individuals suffering from a rare genetic disease called phenylketonuria cannot tolerate the amino acid phenylalanine, one of the building blocks of aspartame as well as naturally occurring proteins. Therefore, products containing aspartame must bear on the label a statement that they contain phenylalanine. Aspartame is available in packets and is used in numerous foods, including cereals, beverage bases, and ready-to-drink iced tea, but because it is not generally heat stable, it is not used for cooking. Food technologists have been working on ways to overcome this instability.

Acesulfame K (K is the chemical symbol for potassium)-130 times sweeter than table sugar?was approved by FDA in July 1988 as a sugar substitute in packets or tablets and as an ingredient in such products as chewing gum, dry drink mixes, and gelatins. The body does not metabolize acesulfame K so it contributes no calories. Soluble in water, it is stable at normal temperatures and does not break down during cooking.

FDA banned the use of the sweetener cyclamate in 1970 because of concerns over its safety, but cyclamate is again under consideration for use in specific products, such as tabletop sweeteners and nonalcoholic beverages.

Under Development

Scientists continue to develop new sugar substitutes. For example, among the nutritive sweeteners, petitions for the use of the sugar alcohols isomalt (in gelatins, hard and soft candies, and baked goods), maltitol (in candy and cough drops), lactitol (in candy, chewing gum, baked goods, and frozen dairy desserts), and hydrogenated starch hydrolisates (in candy, chewing gum, and confections) are under current FDA review, says Art Lipman, Ph.D., a supervisory consumer safety officer with FDA's direct additives branch.

FDA has also received numerous inquiries about the regulatory status of a naturally occurring high-intensity sweetener known as stevia (or stevioside), says Lipman. Extracted from a plant grown in South America, stevia is 300 times sweeter than table sugar and is used for sweetening in Japan and other countries. Lipman says no petition has been filed for its use in the United States.

Two nonnutritive sweeteners are being studied, says George Pauli, Ph.D., chief of the novel ingredients and policy development branch. These are alitame (Pfizer), which is chemically similar to aspartame, and sucralose (McNeil Specialty Products Co.), a chlorinated sucrose that has been made indigestible. FDA is also considering petitions for additional uses of the sweetener acesulfame K in beverages and baked goods and of aspartame for bulk use and in breakfast cereals, malt beverages, candies, and cooked foods.

Eating foods sweetened with nonnutritive sweeteners rather than sugar is an individual choice, says Laura Tarantino, an FDA consumer safety officer. Our law says only that we [FDA] need to assess the safety of a new food additive and its technical effect," she says. "Nonnutritive sweeteners are safe to use. But we don't tell people to replace sugar with artificial sweeteners."

In the future, consumers wanting to know which sweeteners are present in their foods need only read the label. According to an FDA labeling proposal, all sweeteners will be listed together in the ingredient list, under the collective term 'sweetener,' when more than one sweetener is used in a product (following the collective term, each sweetener would be listed in parentheses in descending order of predominance by weight of the sweetener in the food). According to an FDA proposal published late in 1991, it would be mandatory for all complex carbohydrates and simple sugars to be listed on the nutrition label, says Lynn Larsen, Ph.D., director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition's Executive Operations Staff.

People may have an inherent preference for sweetness, and that may have helped our ancestors survive, since bitter-tasting plants are generally not fit to eat. But beyond survival, people seem to have discovered that sweet flavors really help make eating pleasurable.

About the Author

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FDA is A United States government body that oversees medical devices, including contact lenses, intraocular lenses, excimer lasers and eyedrops. In the US, these products must be approved by the FDA before they can be marketed.