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The holy grail of sugar substitution is ironically sugar. The left-handed isomer of glucose still hits our taste buds but doesn't get metabolized in the body. I
by Veliladon 4y ago
The holy grail of sugar substitution is ironically sugar. The left-handed isomer of glucose still hits our taste buds but doesn't get metabolized in the body. It just goes straight through. We've tried it before and it worked absolutely perfectly but to synthesize and then separate the isomers was prohibitively expensive.
Whoever finds a way to make left-handed glucose economically is going to be fucking rich.
- kccqzy 4y agoI thought L-glucose and D-glucose would interconvert in water? They will reach an equilibrium with both present?
- Vloeck 4y agoD-fructose and D-glucose interconvert in basic environment. You cannot convert L-glucose to D-glucose and vice-versa.
- smeagull 4y agoI never see much in replacing Sucrose with normal Glucose. Never understood why.
- tomp 4y agoWhy not make both isomers and feed them to bacteria? Only left-handed remains.
- actionfromafar 4y agoIt's gotta be something more to than that, even 50-50% sugar would be a great product in its own right.
- tablespoon 4y agoMaybe 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.
- actionfromafar 4y agoTrue, you'd need tablespoons of it. :-/
- PaulHoule 4y agoIt seems with all the bacteria out there it seems like there would be one that does something obnoxious with L-sucrose.
- canadianfella 4y ago
- morepork 4y agoFructose is about 50% sweeter than sugar (sucrose), so you can save calories by substituting 2/3 of the quantity of sucrose with fructose
- jb_s 4y agoFructose is metabolised differently IIRC and carries greater risks if anything, possibly this is why HFCS is worse for you.
- morepork 4y agoHFCS 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.
- gowld 4y ago> Why not make both isomers and feed them to bacteria? Only left-handed remains. The hard part is synthesis, not separation.
- adwn 4y agoJust a heads up: you seem to be shadow-banned, all your posts are flagged.
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoHis post looks normal to me... Apparently he got unshadowbanned recently.
- adwn 4y agoI vouched for a couple of them; the others are still dead.
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoinsidious
- eternalban 4y agoWhat posts? It shows empty for me.
- Veliladon 4y agoBecause we have effectively infinite amounts of d-glucose in the biosphere and that's incredibly hard to compete with on cost.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoAlso there's more than one stereocenter in "generalized glucose"
- foxhill 4y agoif 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.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoIt 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
- monkeywork 4y agoI'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
- throwawaymaths 4y agoWell 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.
- twobitshifter 4y agoSpeaking 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?
- Haga 4y ago
- nope96 4y agoInteresting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose
- hsuduebc2 4y agoHoly grail of sweeteners
- giarc 4y ago"L-Glucose was also found to be a laxative," perhaps another factor in it's adoption.
- Filligree 4y agoIn what quantities? Often these tests use implausibly large amounts.
- Auracle 4y agoI’d imagine it works like lactose, and if that’s the case a “regular” dose will do plenty.
- shagie 4y agoIt is the same/similar mechanism as the infamous sugar free gummy bears. https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/sugar-free-gummy-bears-laxatives#Sugar-alcohols,-diarrhea,-and-flatulence https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/sugar-free-...
- orangepurple 4y agoIf you are looking for high speed mass discharge a heaping teaspoon of xylitol or maltitol (what is in sugar free gummy bears) plus coffee will do the trick within 15 minutes.
- semi-extrinsic 4y ago
- throwawaymaths 4y agoL-arabinose is a thing and it's natural. Only really available in Japan though. Might give you some gas because some bacteria can break it down, but probably not as bad as xylitol, erythritol, etc.
- dvirsky 4y agoDoesn't allulose work pretty much the same way?
- throwawaymaths 4y agoOoh, I should try that sometime
- dvirsky 4y agoIt's pretty awesome in terms of taste - it's just a bit less sweet but tastes just like sugar. I didn't find too much info on impact but it seems pretty safe. And you can really use it as a sugar, it even caramelizes. I use it to make home made sugar free ice cream with real sugary consistency. But for me personally, having too much of it makes my stomach rebel.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoYeah I think arabinose is likely to have less of a GI effect (I have eaten some from the lab on a whim) but I can't find any references on this.
- semi-extrinsic 4y agoThe GI effect should be just directly correlated with how well large intestine microbiome can ferment these, IIUC? And I guess also with how much you need to have equivalent taste of 1 g sugar. As in, if it tastes sweet but is not absorbed in the small intestine, so has "no calories", it will inevitably all pass on to the large intestine where it can be fermented. As someone who absolutely hates the synthetic taste of aspartame etc. but has to stay on a low-FODMAP diet, I've just resigned to eating stuff with ordinary sugar and using sufficient moderation.
- antiterra 4y agoDo we know that it doesnt have an effect on gut-biome though?
- Balgair 4y agoThere would be none: "..but cannot be used by living organisms as a source of energy because it cannot be phosphorylated by hexokinase, the first enzyme in the glycolysis pathway. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose EDIT: Ok, yeah, sorry. I'm sure some bacteria out there could do something with it and make you have an upset stomach. But it's not very likely.
- Metacelsus 4y agoToo bad the theoretically cheapest way (mirror-image microorganisms) is an enormous ecological risk.
- kulahan 4y agoCan you please elaborate on this? I tried googling it and just got a lot of seemingly unrelated stuff.
- actually_a_dog 4y agoMirror image microorganisms process and produce molecules of opposite normal chirality as a result of their metabolism. Since there's no a priori reason why life should prefer either left handed or right handed molecules, the way we got here is the result of the first proto-metabolic processes billions of years ago just happening to choose what we use today. If we introduced mirror image microorganisms into the ecosystem, the danger is they could outcompete existing organisms while simultaneously contaminating the environment with their mirror-image waste products.
- grogenaut 4y agoin tl;dr scifi parlance, we could make it so that we'd have bountiful food and starve because we turned earth into an alien planet
- brookst 4y agoWho you calling "we", l-grogenaut?
- herrrk 4y agoPresumably they would be poisoned by the large amount of right handed biochemistry thats everywhere already.. It might be super hard to keep them alive in nature at all. But if youre in the lab and thinking about it could ya whip us up some C-F eating/mineralizing micros? Talk about whats poisoning the biosphere..
- teeray 4y agoIs there any way to do this (safely) in small batch?
- spartanatreyu 4y agoForgive my ignorance, but couldn't consuming opposite chiral chemicals eventually lead to developing prion diseases?
- maxharris 4y agoIs there any evidence that would indicate that this has ever occurred? The way I think about these things is in terms of where the electron density tends to be, what fits into what, how things get recycled inside our cells (Ubiquitin, Cytochrome P450, etc.), so on and so forth. It has been awhile since I looked, last I checked, we don't know how badly-folded prions spread the pattern to other prions. I'd love to know if there is any news on that. Given the above, I would guess that there's no link at all between the two. I could just be very wrong or behind the times.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hsuduebc2 4y agoCan you elaborate this please?
- a9h74j 4y ago> going to be fucking rich It is the year 316720, and the majority of intergallactic trade is in left-handed and right-handed sugar.
- tagh 4y agoGlucose is also known as dextrose for its dextral (right-handed) chirality. Which means that left-handed glucose should be sinistrose. What a name!
- Veliladon 4y agoIt's actually levorotatory glucose not sinistrose. It's derived from the Latin word "laevus" for left and its shortened form is "levo".
- dmurray 4y agoCould you synthesise the mix but not separate the isomers, for sugar with 50% of the calories? Still too expensive?
- notfed 4y agoCool, but sugar (sucrose) is actually glucose+fructose. Is there a calorie-free fructose isomer?
- husamia 4y agoironic how the post suggests they are not entirely harmless and you suggest a holy grail that we don't know much about