FDA Approves More Powerful Sugar Substitute

guttentag writes: "The FDA has approved a new sugar substitute from the people who brought you NutraSweet. It's 7,000 to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar and unlike NutraSweet (aspartame), Neotame apparently doesn't give rats cancer and is safe for people with phenylkeotonuria."

Comments

Re:13,000 times sweeter

[sam_handelman]

There are three ways.

1) You take two liters of water, and add fifty grams of sugar to one liter, and fifty grams of neotame to the other (actually, I think they'd start out with less than that, but bear with me) you give people glasses and ask them which is sweeter? Then, you "lower the dose" of neotame until it's a wash (half of your sample says the sugar water is sweeter, half says the neotame.)

2) You could directly measure the rate at which sweet-taste cells fire (signal the brain) when exposed to a given concentration of the stuff, compared with a set amount (1 Molar, say) of sugar. If 1/13,000 M of Neotame gives the same response as 1M sugar, it's 13,000 times sweeter than sugar. I don't know enough about this technically to know exactly what they'd do, but they'd probably remove the taste cells from the rat and measure the response directly/electrically.

3) You could purify the extracellular domain of the sugar receptors in your taste-bud cells. Then, you'd measure the binding affinity for the compound to the receptor. Assuming every binding event gives an equal amount of sweetness, if Neotame has 13,000 times the binding constant of Sugar, it is 13,000 times sweeter (you need 1/13,000 as much to get a given amount of sweetneses.)

Now, my big problem with nutrasweet is the god damned aftertaste, which is foul. If this replacement doesn't taste metallic (whatever you want to call it), I'll drink it by the gallon.