Relative Sweetness: How Sweet Is Sweet?
Broadly speaking, there are three categories of sweeteners – nutritive, sugar alcohols, and high intensity. Sweetener selection is informed by technical, regulatory and clinical considerations as described in the Introduction to Sweeteners.
A formulator has many choices in selecting a sweetener, but these are not interchangeable, as each has a different sweetness profile – a characteristic intensity, onset, and duration. Understanding the difference between candidates is critical to effective taste masking.
Sweetener Types
The class called nutritive sweeteners consists of roughly a dozen different mono, di, and oligo saccharides commonly used to sweeten foods. These include dextrose, fructose, and (most importantly) sucrose. All have a pleasant sweetness, but are high in calories, cariogenic, and bulky (used in oral formulations at concentrations between 10% and 60%).
For decades, the food industry has endeavored to reduce nutritive sweeteners through the use of low or no-calorie substitutes. Sugar alcohols are one option. These sweeteners are found naturally in small amounts in foods but prepared commercially via the hydrogenation of nutritive sugars or by fermentation. Sugar alcohols do not have the caloric or cariogenic concerns of nutritive sweeteners, but are similarly bulky, taking up 10-60% of the formulation.
More potent are high-intensity, artificial sweeteners. To date, six high-intensity sweeteners are FDA-approved ingredients under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act:
- Saccharin
- Acesulfame potassium
- Aspartame
- Sucralose
- Neotame
- Advantame
With the exception of advantame (approved in 2014), all are precedented for use in drug products per the FDA Inactive Ingredient Database (IID).