IMO the sugar alcohol allulose[1] has crossed the uncanny valley of sweeteners. It tastes (and cooks!) almost like sucrose and it doesn’t have a weird aftertaste. Like erythritol, it is absorbed and excreted unmodified so it is nearly acaloric and doesn’t cause GI problems in reasonable doses. My only minor complaint is that, like erythritol, it causes a slight cooling sensation, so the best use cases are foods that are served chilled.
It is naturally occurring at trace levels in some fruits and was first isolated in the 1940s but commercially viable manufacturing methods only became available recently. It’s starting to appear in some low-carb bars, cereals, and ice creams, but it’s still quite hard to find in products.
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed :)
I like allulose, but the kind I tasted was both less sweet and finer than ordinary table sugar. The granularity of it was more like powdered sugar (and like the other artificial sweeteners like stevia, aspartame, xylitol, erythritol, etc) than ordinary table sugar.
To me tagatose[1] is way more like ordinary table sugar than any other sweetener that I've tried. In fact, it's indistinguishable from sugar to me. It's a real shame it's not more well known.
I came cross tagatose in this article [1] about the company Bonumose [2], which has been attempting to commercialize a production process.
Their efforts were hampered by some drama — some shady grant fraud involving a key Chinese researcher, with subsequent litigation — which is the premise of the article. But another problem with tagatose, historically, is that it's difficult to scale up the process, which requires processing yeasts with exensive enzymes, to commercial levels. Bonumose claims to have solved that problem, but it's still stuck at the patent licensing stage, from what I can tell.
GI issues is actually one of the most reported side effects of allulose. It certainly does a number on me. So much so that I ruled it out as an artificial sweetener after trying it a few times, but I guess it might still work for me as a cheap laxative.
Do you have a link to data on Glycemic Load? Even if something appears to be acaloric it can set off cascading reactions that trigger insulin production in the liver that leads to fat storage. I know this is the case for many sweeteners, and they end up being no better than sugar.
My wife has been trying Allulose over the last month or so, particularly for low carb heated foods, with fairly good luck. In particular, it makes a very good low carb+sugar free caramel that she serves frozen. We've also been using it in homemade ice creams.
We take a can of low sugar peaches or pears, mix in 2tbs of allulose and a pinch of xantham gum, freeze it and then run it through the Ninja Creami and get a quite good sorbet with 120 cal a pint, and super easy to make.
The cooling effects of some of the sugar alcohols, I'm not sure exactly which one, is pretty weird. She made some great cookies that I just wouldn't eat because of that cooling effect. Which makes them even lower calorie. :-)
It is naturally occurring at trace levels in some fruits and was first isolated in the 1940s but commercially viable manufacturing methods only became available recently. It’s starting to appear in some low-carb bars, cereals, and ice creams, but it’s still quite hard to find in products.
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed :)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psicose