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Hitting the Sweet Spot - New Diabetic OK Sweetener
« on: Nov 19th, 2003, 6:06pm » |
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Hitting the Sweet Spot
It's got full flavor at one-third the calories. It's safe for teeth and diabetics. And it's all-natural. The long, strange search for the ultimate sugar substitute.
By Evan Ratliff
Atkins. The Zone. Slim-Fast Dark Chocolate Fudge Shakes. For decades, hucksters and scientists alike have offered an endless string of fixes for our oversize appetites and waistlines. But while their wallets may be getting thicker, we aren't getting any thinner. An even more lucrative future awaits the inventor who can give the US what we really want: the ability to eat anything in sight and not get fat.
When it comes to replacing sugar, plenty have tried. The history of sugar substitutes is a catalog of strange scientific accidents stretching back more than a century. In 1879, chemists Ira Remsen and Constantine Fahlberg synthesized a derivative of coal tar called orthobenzoyl sulfimide. One day, Fahlberg spilled the substance on his hand, which later that evening he touched to his mouth. It tasted sweet. He filed for a patent and called the substance saccharin. In 1937, a University of Illinois grad student discovered another sweetener when he set his cigarette on a lab bench during an experiment - testing a would-be antifever drug - and then took a drag off the cyclamate-coated end. In 1965, a chemist named Jim Schlatter was working on a compound to treat gastric ulcers. He licked his finger to grab a sheet of paper and tasted aspartame for the first time. Then there was the 1976 discovery of sucralose by a King's College student working with chemically altered sugars. The student - not a native English speaker - mistook his professor's instruction to "test" the material and tasted a mouthful.
Unfortunately, these products of serendipity haven't lived up to their promise. Consider the health scares - cyclamates are banned in the US; saccharin can't shake its link to cancer. And there's the fact that most sweeteners have just plain left a bad taste in our mouths. Remember Tab? Diet sodas may be better today, but they're still not quite right. Artificially sweetened foods remain a pale reflection of the real thing.
Now comes a sweetener that does all the wannabes one better: It's natural. It actually is sugar. Unlike high-intensity artificial sweeteners, tagatose looks, tastes, and cooks like sugar. It's 92 percent as sweet as table sugar but with only 38 percent of the calories. Studies suggest it prevents weight gain and doesn't cause cavities. It's safe for diabetics and may even help combat the disease.
Sound too good to be true? Take a walk down to your local 7-Eleven and check it out for yourself. Tagatose has cleared the FDA hurdles; it hit the US market in Pepsi's Diet Slurpee in August. Now Pepsi is looking beyond frozen beverages, testing tagatose in combination with other sweeteners to improve the taste of its diet sodas. Other brands could follow. Kellogg's obtained a patent in 2002 to use tagatose in "improved sucrose-free, noncarcinogenic, reduced-calorie, insulin-independent" sweet cereals. Wrigley and Kraft have patents of their own. As a result, tagatose could begin popping up in products on US grocery store shelves by the end of the year. And its arrival will mark the culmination of the most bizarre sugar substitute discovery of all.
On a sunny morning in his office in Beltsville, Maryland, 79-year-old Gilbert Levin is hunched over a press release from the Danish dairy company Arla Foods. The firm, which holds an exclusive license to food uses of tagatose, has begun production at its first commercial facility, with a second plant on the drawing board. Levin's company, Spherix, will earn a 25 percent royalty on Arla net sales. And in Levin's mind, Slurpees are only the beginning. He wants tagatosein chocolate, cookies, and cakes - and in sugar bowls.
Levin's long, strange search for the ultimate sugar replacement started three decades ago, when he stumbled upon chiral chemistry, the well-established principle that complex molecules exist in "right-handed" and "left-handed" forms, known as enantiomers
There's an easy way to understand chirality. Hold out your hands, palms facing each other. Imagine that each hand is the chemical structure of a molecule. Most complex molecules are chiral. Like your hands, the two structures of chiral molecules - in sugars, they're referred to as D and L, from the Latin dexter and laevus - differ only in the arrangement of their elements. Put your hands together and they seem to match exactly. In the same way, the common sugar D-glucose is the mirror image of L-glucose, its rare counterpart. But put your hands down one on top of the other, both facing down, and you'll see that they're not identical at all; they're what chemists call non-superimposable.
Two enantiomers of a molecule will respond identically in a chemical reaction, but not so in biological systems. Proteins and cell receptors are designed to react only with particular enantiomers. For example, the enzymes in your stomach can digest only right-handed sugars. Just as a glove fits only on the proper hand, our bodies distinguish between the enantiomers of any given molecule.
Louis Pasteur discovered chirality in the 19th century. But the practical implications were few until the past 15 years, when the pharmaceutical industry began to exploit it. Previously, drugs were produced in a mixture of equal parts right-handed and left-handed enantiomers. The problem with such mixtures is that the correct enantiomer might cure a disease, but the wrong one could wreak havoc on the body. Such was the case with thalidomide in the 1960s. One version cured morning sickness during pregnancy; the other caused birth defects. By the late 1980s, researchers had improved methods of synthesizing single enantiomers, which led to a revolution in pharmaceuticals. Suddenly, drug companies could reduce dosages and avoid side effects. Today, chiral pharmaceuticals are a $147 billion business. Lipitor, Zoloft, and Paxil are all single-enantiomer drugs.
Neither chemist, biologist, nor businessman by training, Levin was introduced to chirality - and with it, the inspiration for tagatose - while taking a biochemistry class at Johns Hopkins University in the early '60s. For Levin, it was a third tour at Hopkins; he received a bachelor's in 1947 and a master's in sanitary engineering a year later. In the mid-'50s, while working for the Washington, DC, health department, he had an idea for a faster method of checking beaches and swimming pools for bacteria. He added radiation-laced nutrients to the water samples. If there were bacteria present, he figured, they'd eat the nutrients and give off radioactive CO2, detectable by a Geiger counter. The experiment worked, but it was never widely adopted. "Something about the word radioactive scared the bejesus out of people," he sighs.
More story:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/newsugar.html?tw=wn_story_top5
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Contributing editor Evan Ratliff ([email protected]) wrote about China's Green Great Wall in Wired 11.04.
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