Sugars and Sweeteners: Understanding the Differences

Ingredients used to sweeten beverage, food, candy, and almost any edible product fall into three major categories: sugars, sugar alcohols, and artificial sweeteners. How these sweeteners are produced and the ways in which our bodies process them is different for each category.

Sugars is a actually a broad category of naturally occuring sweetening crystals or nectars that are used to add sweetness to food products. Sugars include granulated table sugar, brown sugar, honey, fructose, and high fructose corn syrup.

Granulated table sugar is the crystals extracted drom syrup made from either sugarcane or beet sugar.

Brown sugar is granulate sugar mixed with molasses, the dark liquid extracted from sugarcane during the refining process.

Honey is a flower nectar. It is metabolized by the body in the same way that sugar is.

Glucose is a sugar derived from starches.

Fructose is a sugar extracted from fruit. However, fructose can also be made by adding enzymes to glucose. Fruit contains moderate amounts of fructose; fruit juices typically contain much more.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is a mixture of sugar derived from corn and from fructose. One of it's most popular uses is to sweeten soft drinks.

Sugar Alcohols include Sorbitol, Mannito, Xylitol, Maltitol, and Isomalt.Some sugar alcohols, such as Xylitol, occur naturally while others are created synthetically in a food lab.

They are often used in foods for people with diabetes because they affect blood sugar levels less dramatically than sugar. They also have far fewer calories than sugar. One drawback is that they can have a laxative effect on the body.

Aspartame is made from amino acids and has virtually no calories. It is 150 to 200 times sweeter than sugar. It's the sweetener in Equal, NutraSweet, and Sugar Twin 2. Aspartame is often used in diet drinks.

Saccharin is the artificial sweetner used in Sweet'N Low. It is 200 to 700 times sweeter than sugar but, unlike sugar, Saccharin has no calories because it is not metabolized by the body. One of the chief complaints most people who have tasted products with saccharin in them is that it leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Sucralose is the newestest artifical sweetener and is better known as Splenda, its commercial name. Sucralose is about 600 times sweeter than sugar but can be up to 1,000 times sweeter depending on the food application. Unlike Saccharine, Sucralose does not leave a bitter aftertaste.

Sucralose is made by replacing three groups of atoms in regular sugar with three chlorine atoms. What results is a sweetener that the body does not metabolize; thus, it does not raise the body's blood glucose levels. While Sucralose is billed as "natural" because it is literally "made" from sugar, it is considered an artificial sweetener since it is made in a lab.