Artificial sweeteners replace sugar with fewer calories and are suitable for people with dietary restrictions. Aspartame is the most used sweetener, while sucralose is challenging it due to its lower price. The global market for artificial sweeteners is driven by economics, with manufacturers pushing their products for higher profit margins.
An artificial sweetener replaces the sugar, usually with fewer calories. It may also be suitable for people with certain dietary restrictions, such as diabetes, by omitting sucrose. These types of sweeteners are a type of sugar substitute, but sugar substitutes generally include both natural substitutes, such as agave, and sweeteners, such as aspartame.
Many people notice a difference in both taste and sensation when they use an artificial sweetener, and it’s rare to find an existing one as the perfect substitute for real sugar. Sometimes a number of sweeteners will be used together or with other flavoring agents, to try and create a taste more like natural sugar. The texture of a sweetener can also be made more like real sugar by adding some sort of bulking agent, to give it a more similar weight.
There are five major artificial sweeteners that have been approved for use in the United States and are found in many foods and beverages. These are: aspartame, acesulfame potassium, neotame, saccharin and sucralose. All five also exist under different brand names. For example, aspartame can be found for sale as NutraSweet, as can neotame, while acesulfame potassium can be found for sale as Nutrinova.
A major push in the global market towards artificial sweetener is a result of grassroots economics. Producing this type of sweetener is much, much cheaper than growing and refining sugar or other natural sweeteners, allowing for a much larger profit margin for manufacturers. As a result, many companies are pushing their diet lines, which use artificial sweeteners instead of real sugar, since they make so much more from each unit sold. At the same time, the profit margins for artificial sweetener manufacturers are also very high, so they are constantly pushing their products over food and beverage manufacturers.
Aspartame is the most used artificial sweetener in the world. It was first discovered in 1965 and the patent eventually went to Monsanto. It was discovered by accident, while looking for an anti-ulcer drug. When the scientist poured some on himself, he licked it and noticed that it was sweet. Aspartame is an excellent sweetener because it is about two hundred times sweeter than sugar itself. Aspartame has been at the center of a health controversy since the early 1980s, when it was approved by the FDA for human consumption, despite a number of studies suggesting a link between its consumption and the generation of brain tumors.
Sucralose is rapidly challenging aspartame, as the processes to create it become more refined and its price drops rapidly. It is approximately six hundred times sweeter than sugar and has had FDA approval since 1998. Although there are some health concerns regarding sucralose, most of the controversy surrounding sucralose as an artificial sweetener comes from a slogan used by Splenda , “ Made with sugar, so it tastes like sugar. The sugar industry in the United States has taken the company to court several times over that slogan, since as a sweetener sucralose is only tangentially produced from sugar.
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