This was first approved for “tabletop use” in the US in 1988–the Wiki article doesn’t say if it was used a a food ingredient before that. Presumably so.
In the 1980s, all you ever heard about was Nutrasweet (aspartame), and then in the 90s (well, 1999) finally you started to hear about Splenda.
Acesulfame potassium? It was actually a TIL for me. I’d never heard about it in any context.
My question is why? What’s the straight dope on this art-swee, and why has it never become as prominent as its fake-o brethren?
I could be wrong here but I seem to remember acesulfame K, by which it is commonly known, is an artifical sweetener that is usually combined with other artifically sweeteners as a sort of intensifier (that may be the wrong term here but I’m drawing a blank). So it may not get as much publicity or scrutiny because it’s not usually the main or only artificial sweetener used.
Maybe because the fashion is to push stevia or sucralose, as more natural …
well stevia is a plant extract.
sucralose is sucrose with Cl replacing some OH… Which makes it taste 1000 times as sweet.
And well they give it a nice sounding name, sucralose, so it might be assumed to be a natural sugar like fructose or glucose or sucrose.
Because names tell you how dangerous something is.
Thats why they don’t put this name on for sucrose…
(a standardised name of the structure … ) (2R,3R,4S,5S,6R)-2-[(2S,3S,4S,5R)-3,4-Dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxapent-2-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxahexane-3,4,5-triol
It’s used in a lot of stuff. Coke Zero is a mix of aspartame and ace K, for example. I just looked at the ingredients of the Walmart Great Value brand diet lemon-lime soda product, and it’s the same: aspartame & ace K. Minute Maid light lemonade, too. Etc.
It’s a good question, though. I’ve long been aware of ace-K, as it mixed with aspartame is my favorite sugar substitute (and the one I find most convincing), but I’ve never heard it marketed along the lines of Nutrasweet/aspartame, Splenda/sucralose, or stevia (yuck.) I’ve also never seen ace-K used on its own, but always paired with another artificial sweetener, usually aspartame, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it paired with sucralose, too.
The pairing is the key. I don’t remember the details but IIRC the idea in pairing aspartame and acesulfame K in Coke Zero (and in other products, and similar pairings) is that one of them tends to create a blast of sweetness that then tapers off into a bitter aftertaste while the other acts more slowly and balances the effects of the first, producing a close simulation of natural sugar. And it works.
That was my understanding of it, too, that the ace K takes the edge off Nutrasweet. Or that they have a symbiotic effect on each other, mellowing each other’s bad points.
Just to add to the data points, I just bought some Diet Pepsi, and it is sucralose and ace k. When did this happen? I swear it was nutrasweet back in the day.
Diet Pepsi replaced aspartame with sucralose a year or two ago because… reasons. Pseudoscience “chemicals are bad” nonsense, really. Diet Coke still uses aspartame and tastes better for it.
