I bought a jar of Mt. Olive Sweet Relish the other day. I didn’t look closely at the label, but it does clearly say “NO SUGAR ADDED”, and it also says 0 calories per serving. All is still fine.
The intersection of Cucumber&Vine is cute, though.
But then I tasted it. BLEEECH. Looking at the ingredients, I noticed Sucralose. I hate the taste of it and I find it as a sweetener in more and more products. Examining the label again, I see the little “Splenda” logo. Damn.
Why?
All other sugars must be named specifically. Fructose, dextrose, invert sugar (honey), agave nectar, corn syrup, etc. On packaging sugar means sucrose, per the FDA.
I hate that stuff too. I think they think people want sweet stuff every where, even if it doesn’t need it. I would assume that on a package like that it means that it was supposed to be naturally sweet and nothing added.
Everytime I’ve tasted something where sucralose was used as a sweetener, I’ve found it horrible tasting. I can’t understand why it is used, unless most people like the taste.
I assumed other ingredients added sweetness. Like maybe a sweet pepper?
I purchased a vinaigrette salad dressing recently that boasted “Only x calories per serving”. Not surprising, as vinegar is low calorie. The first time I tried the dressing it tasted ok, then the sucralose taste hit me. I checked the ingredient label and yep, sucralose. Damn.
I can’t find anything about sucralose in particular, but, because of genetic differences, different artificial sweeteners taste different to different people.
Anecdotally speaking, it’s the only artificial sweetener I can stand. I drink mostly “lite” liquids that are half or quarter the calories because of sucralose.
Yeah, but this is sweet relish. People who are buying it want it sweet. You can’t have a sweet relish without adding something sweet into it, like sugar, or artificial sweeteners. Cucumbers are not anywhere near sweet enough to make that which is normally regarded as sweet relish.
As for sucralose, I don’t like it on its own, but combined with Ace K – I dunno what it is – but the Ace K takes that weird greasy kind of aftertaste/feeling on the back of my tongue or something I get with Splenda on its own. Those two combined taste closest to sugar to me. On their own, I like aspartame and saccharine probably equally well, but I haven’t had the latter in ages. Then well down is sucralose. And then Stevia, which is a natural sweetener, but I find god fucking awful.
I was stumped by the reference to invert sugar having something to do with honey. I had assumed that “invert sugar” had something to do with L-glucose, the non-digestible left-handed version of ordinary right-handed glucose (D-glucose). I ended up on a Google dive into the world of sweeteners and discovered L-glucose was a dead end, and really isn’t used in anything. I still have no idea why a mixture of glucose and fructose is called “invert sugar”. Can anyone tell me what the heck is inverted about it?
I don’t know. It goes back to the 19th century so you have to look at word usage then.
One WAG. Invert sugar is a physical combination of glucose and fructose rather than a chemical combination the way sucrose is. Around the same time homosexuals were called inverts. Both are metaphorical extensions of the more literal “upside-down.”
None actually, but I’ve seen things like apple sauce and the like say no sugar added, and to me that means that any sugars would be natural. But any more I’ve only seen it to mean they add a bunch of artificial sweeteners.
I am bizarro you. Like sucralose (for a very broad definition of “like” - it’s my least offensive artificial sweetener), utterly despise saccharin. Like to the point I used to wonder why anyone still manufactured the vile stuff when superior fake sugars had been invented.
Probably should have guessed there was a genetic component - my mother’s affection for saccharine now halfway makes sense. I had thought she was just being old and stubborn .
.