They put the other sugars in there essentially for volume. As mentioned, sucralose is many, many times more sweet than any type of natural sugar. Wikipedia says it’s 600 times as sweet as regular table sugar (sucrose.)
It would be hard to manage a packet of Splenda if it contained 1/600th the volume (that is to say, the packets would be even smaller, with even less stuff inside, making it harder to get out.)
Plus, people would feel like they were getting ripped off. That last one is a big point. It wouldn’t matter that they got the same amount of sweetness, most people would see tinier packets, and even tinier amounts of powder (almost imperceptible amounts, really), and assume something was up and stop buying it, plain and simple.
So SUGAR is the only option for bulking out the product? That seems suspect to me. The only way to bulk out the product is to add sugar calories to a “sugar and calorie free” product? I think taste is also a factor. Maltodextrin is used for bulking and texture, I agree there. But the dextrose, how is that for bulking? I think that would be to make the product taste more like regular sugar. Pure sucralose probably wouldn’t taste like what most people think of as “sugar”, or what they expect when they tear open that packet.
Well that “naive” hypothetical dieter counting calories is likely not going to be so exact that the 120 calories from 30 Splenda packs is grossly affecting his or her total daily caloric intake. And if this hypothetical dieter likes things so sweet that he or she goes through the equivalent of 60 teaspoons of sugar a day, the Splenda isn’t the thing that will sabotage the diet. This is inventing a problem that isn’t there.
My WAG is the bulking agent has to be the same texture, color, solubility as the sweetener itself or the end product would be kind of gnarly (ie if it left white residue at the bottom of your coffee or on your fruit) and it couldn’t taste too different or it would be even more gnarly. It would have to be something either completely tasteless or sweet, and the only other things that taste sweet are sugars.
I’ve never tried straight up sucralose (and wouldn’t want to since Splenda tastes weird enough to me) so I don’t know if the flavor would be different.
Probably. The commercials I remember would always say “and get the second absolutely free!!!” and on the screen where they show the phone number “plus s&h” would be in teeny-tiny letters.
On a scale in which sucrose has a sweetness of 100, dextrose has a sweetness of about 75 and maltodextrin about 10. Lactose, with a sweetness of 16, is widely used as a bulking agent and can be found in one or two sugar substitutes, but its use has been declining as more people become aware of lactose intolerance. So dextrose and maltodextrim work to keep the overall taste sweet but add minimal sweetness themselves, have good properties (powder well, don’t clump, minimal integral taste), and are known not to cause any problems in almost everyone. It’s almost impossible to find substances like that, especially not bitter ones, which is why you’ll see these in almost every processed food of every variety.
That’s what makes it shady! Seriously, you do make a valid point and I’m thinking there must have been some complaints or they’d still be doing it that way.
A lot of the time the announcer actually says “We’ll give you a second Ultra Magic Power Widget FREE!! (just pay additional processing)”, so they’ll do that.
High fructose corn syrup, which is in nearly every processed food, usually contains at least 45% glucose. And as you pointed out earlier, dextrose is glucose.
This is tangential to the thread, but if you want truly 0-calorie, 100% pure sucralose, sweetener, get liquid sucralose. It’s sold under the unfortunate name of EZ-Sweetz.
Dextrose, because it is a sugar, caramelizes with heat. Every french fry you’ve ever had was probably sprayed with dextrose to give it that golden brown. Any processed food that is supposed to look nicely brown when done probably uses dextrose. This isn’t an absolute and lactose is often used this way as well, but as I said the popularity of lactose has been slowly dropping.
I’m assuming you mean the ones I don’t cut and cook myself.
One of the ‘advantages’ of Splenda is that it can be used in baking, unlike Equal. The dextrose helps there also, both in it’s ability to brown and because it is heat stable.
The most recent time I was in the UK I saw quite a few ads for things like “London to Little Dunny On The Woad [by train] from £5” and you’d think “You know, I’ve been meaning to go there and see the Medieval Ruins (or whatever)” and then discover that the £5 fare was a child’s fare and only applicable to the 5:51am service, and the actual fare for an adult at any time you’d want to travel was something like £31.75 each way.
I’m not sure it’s really “shady”- there were indeed fares on that route to that destination for £5- but I would argue that the ads didn’t reflect the actual cost for the average person to travel to that destination.
How about buying tickets to an event through Ticketmaster? They tell you a price, but then they just keep adding on bullshit service fees, convenience fees, etc. one by one until the ticket is practically double what was advertised. I don’t see how it’s even legal.
I know this thread is a bit old but I had to revive it for this:
Sobe LifeWater, which advertises as having 0 calories, has the following information on it’s nutrition facts section on it’s labeling:
Calories: 0
Total Fat: 0g
Sodium: 25mg
Total Carbohydrate: 6g
Protein: 0g
The carbohydrate content is the part of interest here. The LifeWater product has six grams of carbs per serving (per bottle). One gram of carbohydrates has four (4) calories. So six carbs will have 24 calories. So one bottle of Sobe Lifewater will have at least 24 calories per bottle. Yet, they are somehow permitted to advertise their product as being “calorie free”. How is this possible? Now with the Splenda and other similar products, the argument is that it is less that 5 calories per serving that allows it to be labeled “zero calories per serving”. But with LifeWater, how it this still possible?
