sweetener

Any chemical that gives sweetness to food. Caloric sweeteners are various forms of sugar; noncaloric, or artificial, sweeteners are used by dieters and diabetics and provide neither energy nor bulk. Questions have been raised about the long-term health effects from several artificial sweeteners.

Sweeteners are used to make highly processed foods attractive, whether sweet or savoury. Most of the noncaloric sweeteners do not have E numbers. Some are banned for baby foods and for young children: thaumatin, aspartame, acesulfame-K, sorbitol, and mannitol. Cyclamate is banned in the UK and the USA; acesulfame-K is banned in the USA.

In 1997, Japanese geneticists engineered a strain of yeast that produces a protein, called monellin, which is 3,000 times as sweet as sugar and 15 times sweeter than aspartame. Monellin occurs naturally in the berries of a West African plant, Dioscoreophyllum cumminisii and, as a protein, it contains only 4 kilocalories per gram.