A New Sweetener Has Joined the Ranks of Aspartame and Stevia
A few months ago, my doctor uttered a phrase I’d long dreaded: Your blood sugar is too high. With my family history of diabetes, and occasional powerful cravings for chocolate, I knew this was coming and what it would mean: To satisfy my sweet fix, I’d have to turn to sugar substitutes. Ughhhh.
Dupes such as aspartame, stevia, and sucralose (the main ingredient in Splenda) are sweet and have few or zero calories, so they typically don’t spike your blood sugar like the real thing. But while there are now more sugar alternatives than ever, many people find that they taste terrible. The aspartame in Diet Coke leaves the taste of pennies in my mouth. And in large amounts, substitutes are bad for you: Last year, the World Health Organization warned that artificial sweeteners could raise the risk of certain diseases, singling out aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic.”
But last week, I sipped a can of Arnold Palmer with a brand-new sweetener that promised to be unlike all the rest. The drink’s strong lemon flavor was mellowed by a light, unremarkable sweetness that came from brazzein, a sugar substitute green-lighted by the FDA last month. Oobli, a California-based company that sells the lemonade-iced tea and manufactures brazzein (which occurs naturally in West Africa’s oubli fruit), has billed it as a “revolution in sweetness.” Yet like everything that came before it, brazzein is far from perfect: To help mask its off taste, the can had some real sugar in it too. For now, Eric Walters, a sweetener expert at Rosalind Franklin University, told me, brazzein is just “an alternative” to the many options that already exist. None has come even close to the real deal.
