| |
What with sucrose, dextrose, glucose, fructose, and isomerose
the food industry must seem surfeited with a ring o’ses
to sweeten its products —and not to mention “safety-tested”
synthetics such as saccharin, acesulfame, and aspartame. The
industry requires oses for purposes —liquid, solid, suitability
for confectionery, biscuits, soft-drinks, hot, cold, and so
on, but above all intensity of sweetness per metabolic calorie.
Nature’s bounty in the fruits is not enough for the food
technician but just right for consumers. Sugar — cane
and beet and the others, home-grown or imported — is
a significant crop in the world’s agricultural economy
and essential in the trading and prosperity, albeit precarious,
of many tropical countries. European farmers like to grow
sugar beet, even when it is surplus to the world’s requirements
and when the enzymologist would enjoy relaxation of tariffs
to increase conversions of waste from cereals and starchy
products such as potatoes into sweetening food ingredients
that might otherwise pose embarrassing environmental problems.
Clever applications of molecular biology and modelling and
biochemistry have yielded compounds with modifications conferring
the sought-after intensity of sweetness and low content of
metabolically available calories. Use of such sweeteners,
with similar tricks with fats and texturing agents, would
offer the food industry opportunities for many commercial
innovations without objections from nutritionists and doctors
lamenting the nation’s obesity and diabetes and the corollaries
of harm, especially in children.
Sweet, but unlovely: now sucralose, a new semisynthetic sweetener,
is edging into the market in the UK after a temporary (2-year)
authorization under regulations implementing an EC Directive
on purity criteria for 2 other sweeteners, mannitol and acesulfame
K. It has been a hard slog to win even this much authority
from the Scientific Committee on Food, which advised the EC
on consumer health and food safety that “sucralose is
acceptable as a sweetener for general food use.” The
Committee on Toxicology of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products,
and the Environment, which has advised the Food Standards
Agency has endorsed the SCF’s opinion.
This sweetness, won with the bitterness of testing on
animals for the frivolous cosmetic tinkerings of taste, is
driven by commercial exploitation that consumers should not
brook. A closed purse and a powerful consumer voice are the
means to halt these cruel follies.
<<
PAGE TOP >>
|
|
