Every kind of asparatame or sucralose in the stores is mixed with dextrose and maltodextrin as “bulking agents.” But I’d like to have a bag of pure aspartame or sucralose to make my own diet drinks and whatnot out of. Clearly you’d have to use very small amounts, since aspartame is ~200 times sweeter than sugar and sucralose is 500-600 times sweeter than sugar.
So, does anybody know if you can you get either pure aspartame or pure sucralose anywhere?
On another note, how can they use dextrose as a bulking agent for calorie-free artificial sweeteners? Isn’t that just glucose? And wouldn’t that have 4 calories per gram, and cause cavities, like regular sugar?
Both of those, as far as I know, are just liquid Splenda with flavoring.
As for “pure” liquid Splenda…when I was more into the “low carb community” people bought this stuff all the time from these little cottage places. No one died that I know of…but I didn’t stick around to see
You can also get stevia that isn’t combined with dextrose or maltodextrin.
A slight hijack that I think you should consider… there is good evidence that artificial sweeteners cause insulin reactions similar to glucose. Cite
You can easily find more information on this topic if you search for it. Understanding insulin may or may not be important to you. I include it only as a reference and as something that many people find counter intuitive.
Thanks. It’s not much of a concern to me; I’m only concerned with tooth decay and, to a lesser extent, zero calorie-hood.
But … the whole idea of artificial sweeteners causing an insulin reaction like sugar seems bizarre to me. Surely it can’t result in as MUCH insulin release as the equivalent sweetness in sugar would, since these sweetners are 200-600 times sweeter than sugar … right?
And I can’t tell – is a dose of 20mg/kg of body weight a normal amount of artificial sweetener? (The sweetener in question is acesulfame potassium, which is ~200 times sweeter than sugar – about the same as aspartame and 1/4 as sweet as sucralose.)
Have those experiments been repeated and shown reliable? Do they have any idea why? It just makes no sense to me.
Maybe we should start a new thread about this… it’s very interesting …
It could very well be that it’s the taste of sweet itself that is partially responsible for insulin release, and that whether or not that sweet taste is caused by a digestible chemical is irrelevant. Taste (and its close cousin, smell) don’t exist solely to get us to eat things. Different taste also trigger different bodily processes. The most well known is probably bitter - bitter tastes trigger the release of digestive fluids, most notably bile. This is why coffee after a nice hearty fat-filled breakfast makes you feel less overstuffed, why bitter liqueurs like Campari, Byrrh, Dubonnet, Suze and Jägermeister are enjoyed after meals and why bitter salad greens are traditionally eaten after a meal instead of sweet salads before like here in the US.
It may be (research being done) that in a similar manner, sweet triggers insulin, no matter what the chemical causing the sweet. If it’s sweet enough to engage the sweet receptor taste bud, it’s enough to cause insulin to be released. And, from a Cavediet perspective, it makes total sense that we evolved to release insulin in reaction to sweet - there *was *nothing else besides digestible carbs to trigger that taste bud.
