Weight loss regimens generally require cutting sugar from your diet because, as we all know, too much sugar leads to obesity, the biggest problem facing most first-world people. Artificial sweeteners were created to help reduce obesity health risks like diabetes and a fatty liver, but the fact that they contain aspartames and stevia makes them dangerous.
A start-up company in Israel has come up with a new artificial sweetener that isn’t actually artificial at all but rather a modified version sugar with a hi-tech inner core.
DouxMatok invented an innovative way to coat food-safe nanoparticles of cellulose or silica (i.e. the main components of beach sand), successfully replicating the sweetness and texture of processed sugar but with less than 25% to 55% sugar content.
The tiny food safe particles are coated with natural sugar like glucose or sucrose and, as such, trick the sweetness receptors on our tongue into thinking you are eating a full-serving of sugar.
DouxMatok CEO Eran Baniel commented on the new artificial sweetener’s effect towards the body in an interview with Fast Company, comparing it to drug delivery in pharmaceuticals:
“Drug delivery allows you to take less of an active material and ship it to where you need it. . . . You ship less of it and you create less damage along the way, we do flavor delivery. You take less of the active material-the active material being sugar in this case. But you still use sugar.”
Achieving good health is both a mental and physical exercise that is challenging for many people, explaining why there is a growing market for easy, sometimes hazardous ‘fixes’. Baniel added:
“Health is not only a physical condition, health is a mixture of the mental and the physical. The beauty of what we do is that we do not deprive people of what they like in terms of taste. We were proven-absolutely proven-as identical in sensory profile to sugars. But whilst we offer people what makes them happy mentally, we help them be happy mentally without consuming too much of what can really harm them.”
A sweetener that eschews most sugar content for edible particles are coated with natural sugar may curb some of the not-so-great health effects of our often sugar-heavy diets. Let’s just hope people don’t consume too much of it, lest they want to overstimulate their taste buds and increase their sweetness threshold.
How bad is your sweet tooth?
