Natural low-calorie sweeteners - Natural Food Additives, Ingredients and Flavourings - page 68

Phyllodulcin appears to have no regulatory status outside Japan, where a
preparation of fermented leaves is listed in the Japanese Pharmacopoeia.

3.6 Conclusions
Excluding sugars and polyols, more than a hundred natural, sweet compounds are
known. All except lysozyme are plant-derived and the majority are high-potency
sweeteners, many times sweeter than sucrose on a weight basis. This means they
are also low-calorie in that, even if they are digested for energy, the amounts
needed to sweeten foods are nutritionally negligible. However, few of these
substances have the all the requisite properties to succeed as commercial
sweeteners. These attributes include a good quality of sweetness, delivered with a
temporal characteristic not too dissimilar from sucrose, adequate water solubility,
stability to food processing and storage conditions, and acceptable cost-in-use.
Above all, they must be demonstrably safe to consume.
The bulk (low potency) sweeteners, erythritol and tagatose, are already
established commercially. Similarly accepted are the high-potency molecules,
thaumatin and glycyrrhizin, although these are more commonly used as fl avour
enhancers than sweeteners. In contrast, the steviol glycosides and lo han guo
(mogrosides) have only recently begun to make inroads in the key sweetener
markets of the West, namely North America and the EU. We can expect to
hear more of these as their use broadens. The future is likely see efforts to
introduce monatin and maybe brazzein too. Both will probably be produced
biotechnologically, which will limit their 'natural' description to the US.
Nevertheless, monatin has such an excellent taste, combined with very high
potency, that it has the potential to rival existing synthetic sweeteners regardless
of whether it has the cachet of a natural label.

3.7 Sources of further information and advice
GIBBS , B . F . , ALLI , I . and MULLIGAN , C . ( 1996 ), ' Sweet and taste-modifying proteins: A
review ', Nutr. Res. , 16 ( 9 ), 1619 - 1630 .
KINGHORN , A . D . ( ed. ) ( 2002 ), Stevia. The genus Stevia , Taylor & Francis , London and
New York .
KINGHORN , A . D . , CHIN , Y .- W . , PAN , L . and JIA , Z . ( 2010 ), ' Natural products as sweeteners and
sweetness modifi ers ', in Mander L. and Liu , H.W. (series eds.), Verpoorte , R. (vol. ed.),
Comprehensive Natural Products Chemistry II: Chemistry and Biology, Vol. 3,
Development & Modifi cation of Bioactivity , Elsevier , Oxford , pp. 269 - 315 .
NABORS , L . ( ed. ) ( 2001 ), Alternative Sweeteners , 3rd edition , Marcel Dekker , New York .
TEMUSSI , P . (2006), 'The history of sweet taste: Not exactly a piece of cake', J. Mol.
Recognit. , 19 , 188 - 199 .
WEERASINGHE , D . K . and DUBOIS , G . E . (eds.) ( 2007 ), ACS Symposium Series: Sweetness and
Sweeteners. Biology, Chemistry and Psychophysics , American

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Chemical Society ,

Washington DC .
WILSON , R . (ed.) ( 2007 ), Ingredients Handbook - Sweeteners , 3rd edition, Leatherhead
Publishing and Blackwell, Leatherhead and Oxford.