It's gotta be something more to than that, even 50-50% sugar would be a great product in its own right.

Maybe the problem is more with synthesizing sugar without biological help. After some cursory googling, it sounds like many artificial sweeteners are several orders of magnitude "sweeter" than table sugar, so you'd have to synthesize far more L-sucrose to get a similar effect.

True, you'd need tablespoons of it. :-/

It seems with all the bacteria out there it seems like there would be one that does something obnoxious with L-sucrose.

Fructose is about 50% sweeter than sugar (sucrose), so you can save calories by substituting 2/3 of the quantity of sucrose with fructose

Fructose is metabolised differently IIRC and carries greater risks if anything, possibly this is why HFCS is worse for you.

HFCS isn't particularly high in fructose. Sucrose is essentially 1:1 fructose to glucose. HFCS is typically either 42% or 55% fructose, the rest glucose, so basically the same. Honey and agave nectar are also similar.

I can't say I'm an expert, but I haven't seen anything where consuming fructose is worse overall than other sugars. Fruits for example also tend to be high in fructose, and if you're going to have sugars they tend to be one of the best ways.

Because we have effectively infinite amounts of d-glucose in the biosphere and that's incredibly hard to compete with on cost.

Also there's more than one stereocenter in "generalized glucose"

if we could make racemic glucose (i.e. a 50:50 split of D/L-glucose), the battle would be done.

you'd expect to see this if we had a purely synthetic process for the creation of glucose in the lab. but, as far as i know, we only have other biological processes that produce glucose, and as such, only produce the one isomer.

It is 100% possible to make glucose synthetically, racemically or otherwise. I believe it was done in the 60s and iirc sharpless used sugar synthesis to demonstrate the power of asymmetric epoxidation (which he won the Nobel for).

It is however very not economical to do so

I've seen the economics talked about a few times in this thread but having no experience at all with the industry - what is the difference between economical and not in actual dollar values?

If you were to produce a KG of this vs say our common art-sweetners what is the cost multipler

Well keep in mind that stuff like sucralose may be more expensive to make but it's also selected because it's way more potent, so there's a lot of filler (usually cyclodextrin?) To fill out a packet and make a cooking/flavoring equivalent.

Though I'm not 100% sure maybe sucralose is made by enzymatically installing those halogens? I could be very wrong.

Speaking of filler, it seems the experiment in question didn’t control for that? Since there’s so little artificial sweetener is it possible the gut flora are reacting to the filler?

The experiment in the article explicitly does control for this

> The participants (20 per group) were given sweetener packets of aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, or stevia, each bulked out with glucose to an equivalent size, with another group that got just glucose and another group that took no sweeteners at all.

In this experiment, the artificial sweeteners used glucose as the filler. They also account for the effects of the glucose filler on the insulin response in all groups by measuring the difference in the response.

My guess is a minimum of 5-10x more expensive at scale.

Sugar is really cheap, especially if you don’t mind which particular local source you use (sugar cane, corn syrup, etc).

Just a heads up: you seem to be shadow-banned, all your posts are flagged.

His post looks normal to me...

Apparently he got unshadowbanned recently.

I vouched for a couple of them; the others are still dead.

insidious

What posts? It shows empty for me.