Right. Does anyone want to know why things like Olestra and saccharine are made? Or, to be more accurate, how exactly you can have a sweetener or flavoring that doesn’t get deposited in the body?
Lemme be up-front and say that I can’t describe it with the degree of depth and understanding you’d get with an inorganic chemist (such as my IOChem prof, who explained this all to us). However, I do know a bit. Basically what you have are isomers. Isomers are molecules that have identical chemical formulae, identical bonding (so to speak. It’s more complicated, from a molecular standpoint, than this post, but for our purposes we needn’t get into cis, trans, Laevo, Dext, etc.) and … well, that’s about it. (First time explaining it. Bit nervous, but I wanna do it without the help of an outside source if possible).
Look at your hands. The general population (after all the “gay” threads lately I sure as shit am not saying “all people…”) consist of people, each of whom has a left hand and a right hand. They’re stackable; your left hand generally is the mirror image of your right hand. This is the case with one type of isomers. You have all the same parts (palm, fingers assembled a certain way) but they are mirror images of each other.
This is how you can have something act as a sweetener but pass cleanly through the body (and, con resultat, not get impeded by the stomach, large intestine, colon, etc. It can mess with your digestive system something fierce, as some have experienced). The body’s enzymes, from my recollection of how it was loosely (heh) explained, are used to certain shapes of molecules. When they come across something for which they don’t have a match, it passes through, which is one reason you can eat and pass coins without digesting any part of them. With nutrasweet, saccharine, olestra and probably several other things (I’m not exactly up on all the isomers being used in food processing), this is exactly what happens. And if you don’t digest something, your body can’t store it as food.
Incidentally, isomers are - I am told, at any rate - the reason that thalidomide was such a catastrophe. What happened was that the folks in charge of quality control didn’t know (and didn’t figure out until, er, later) that the chemical in question had an (optical?) isomer that … well, you can Google up images. So one version of the molecule was perfectly fine for (pregnant, even) human consumption. The other was distinctly not.
