Sweeteners

Sweeteners 101

Main topics of this virtual lecture

• Natural Sweeteners

Where does sugar come from?
Sugar we know has 2 main sources, sugarbeets and sugarcane. The most remarkable thing is, countries that produce mostly cane sugar are located in the southern hemisphere. The same is happening for the northern hemisphere where countries overall produce beet sugar. At the equator both cane and beet are used to make sugar.

We have natural sweeteners

• Sugars
  
  Glucose is produced by photosynthesis of plants. A chemical where sunlight and CO2 and Water is transformed in glucose and O2. This si the reason we humans can breathe. We know several sugars like sucrose, maltose, lactose and more. Sugars are formed in a ring structure. When we have 2 rings we call it disaccharide. A single ring is called a monosaccharide. If
  there are more than 2 rings we call it polysaccharide.
  The sugar we know as table sugar sucrose and it is a disaccharide. This can be manufactured in a different form, brown sugar, white and powdered sugar, So however it is a different kind of sugar it is still sucrose.
• Syrups
  
  Syrups are a viscous liquid that has a high concentration of sugars. The most well known are honey and maple syrup. The viscosity is high because of the multiple OH bonds sugars can make in water. HFGS is often used to sweeten different products. Because fructose is the sweetest sugar known. Fructose is 1.7 times sweeter than glucose. Even wors is that fructose gets immediately dissolved in your blood system.
• Sugar alcohols
  Sugar alcohos are mostly used in bubble or in in gum. The difference is, these sweeteners ares sightly less sweet their normal sugar counterparts. Sugar alcohols, do have a OH group in there structure. These polyiols have some caricaristics.

1. Low digestibility
2. Low caloric value
3. Relative less sweet
4. No browning reaction
5. No glucose increase in our blood
6. Sugar free gum, mostly contains Xyotol

In the next lecture discuss a popular unnatural sweetener called Stevia, a sweetener 250 times sweeter than Glucose. I will the discuss the plusses and minusses of adding stevia in different products. Is it really healtier or is it not. We will learn in the next lecture.