Sugar substitutes are synthetically or naturally produced sweeteners that have significantly higher sweetening power than regular sugar. The relative sweetening power of a sweetener is measured by comparing it to sucrose, common sugar, whose value is set to 1. For artificial sweeteners, this value ranges from 10 to 10,000. There are also sweeteners that go even higher, for example Lugduname, which has a sweetening power of 220,000 to 300,000, but is not approved as a consumable in most countries. An advantage of these substances is that they are almost calorie-free, which makes them useful for diet and light foods. Unlike sugar, they do not cause cavities. Time and time again there are discussions about the dangers of artificial sweeteners, but no real studies that actually prove their harm.
The first artificial sugar substitute, saccharin, was found by the German chemist Constantin Fahlberg and came on the market in 1885. Its sweetness is up to 300-500 as high as sucrose. Its popularity grew quite fast and in 1910 175 tons of saccharin were already being produced. The sugar industry feared revenue losses and won a ban on the new sugar substitute. Only for diabetics it was possible to buy it at the pharmacy. But in World War II the prohibition was removed, because sugar became a scarce commodity.
As a natural sweetener you can find many syrups such as barley malt syrup or maple syrup, or simpler simply honey. But they can’t really be used as food supplements, and are more for sweetening tea, for example.
The first known natural sweetener whose extract can be used as a dietary supplement is the stevia plant. Its origin is in South America where it has been used as a sweetener for many centuries. The Swiss botanist Moises Giacomo Bertoni discovered it in 1887. It is up to 300 times sweeter than sugar. The first cultivation experiments were carried out in the 1950s, and beginning in the 1970s, stevia was cultivated in large quantities in Japan. It is not yet approved in Europe, due to concerns that steviol, a breakdown product of the main component stevioside, is mutagenic. In studies supporting this thesis, rats were given half their body weight in stevia leaves. If a human ate half their body weight in sugar, that wouldn’t be very healthy either. So this study seems pretty untenable and also long-term use of stevia in South America and Japan without incident shows that stevia is safe. There are also some studies that say that it has many positive side effects. But probably the sugar industry has a finger in the pie here again.