Agriculture & Food

"Consumers generally don't care much about the ingredients, but mainly look at the taste." Gu Zhongyi, a nutritionist, wrote on Weibo. However, the Chinese beverage company Yuanqi Forest has recently been caught up in a controversy over whether its drinks contain sugar or not. The hot topic makes more Chinese consumers start to care about raw materials.

Controversy also exists in the raw material market for soda.

Can sugar substitutes (artificial sweeteners) eventually replace sucrose? So far, the government, non-profit organizations and companies that represent the interests of consumers are still mediating. Just as the sugar industry has repeatedly fought for itself.

Sugar changed from good medicine to poison

Originally, people's attitude towards sugar was nothing so noisy, or there was no such thing. Indian physicians 2000 years ago said that sugar "not only provides nutrition, but also makes people fat."

But in the past nearly a century, the government that cares about the population, the sugar industry that wants to make more money, and the consumers who try to keep healthy have mixed together, and the balance has fallen to one end.

Like the probiotics promoted in the 1930s and multivitamins today, the Sugar Industry Association promotes that sugar is a healthy food. After a world war, in the United States, sugar changed from a good medicine for strengthening physical fitness to a poison that made people fat and sick.

At that time, catching up with the conscription, a group of young people were dismissed because of tooth decay, and the US government was annoyed by this. So, when the US Department of Justice sued the Sugar Industry Association for controlling market prices, the government sat and watched. The Sugar Industry Association eventually lost the lawsuit and was forced to dissolve, followed by anti-sugar public opinion.

The American Medical Association believes that "obesity has become the number one health problem for Americans." Americans began to popularize dieting, and a new low-calorie food and beverage industry emerged-zero-calorie soda, low-calorie cola and various other sugar-free snacks.

In order to fight back, the Sugar Industry Association planned a three-year promotion plan that cost 1.8 million US dollars.

The sugar industry even paid to set up a new non-profit organization-the American Sugar Research Foundation. This organization specializes in guiding the public's awareness of sugar, funding and sorting out sugar-related research, and finding evidence that sugar is beneficial to the human body. And growers, refineries and processing plants, they spend a total of 1 million US dollars a year to support their operations.

At that time, their propaganda strategy came from two nutritional hypotheses. One is that obesity is caused by undifferentiated excess energy; the other is that hunger is either caused by hypoglycemia or because the central nervous system senses insufficient glucose.

These two hypotheses are not supported by experimental data. But in terms of publicity effect, it is indeed effective.

People gradually believe that if calories are to be restricted, not only sugar, but all foods should be restricted. And, whether you want to lose weight or not, sugar is valuable in all types of diets. Sugar was even once packaged as a tool for weight loss.

The sugar industry not only reshaped the public's understanding of sugar in terms of health, but also persuaded public health agencies and the federal government. This paved the way for them to make money for the next 25 years and won the post-war market.

Which is better, sugar substitute or sugar?

One is a non-calorie artificial sweetener, and the other is a high-calorie natural sweetener. Originally, for people who want to lose weight, this question is not difficult to choose. But the public's perception was quickly muddled.

When low-calorie beverages and foods first emerged, in the 1960s, the American sugar industry was struggling to maintain the status of sugar in a healthy diet, and it did not forget to attack its direct opponent, sugar substitutes.

When the government and industry associations are still discussing: which is better, sugar substitute or sugar? The sugar industry has already brainwashed the public through advertising. For example, saccharin is a sweetener extracted from coking coal, which not only lacks any nutrients, but also harms health.

Catch up with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is pushing the "Pure Food and Drug Act." The bill prohibits the addition of dangerous preservatives to processed foods and also prohibits drugs from containing addictive and unsafe ingredients.

The sugar industry took advantage of this opportunity. The question is secretly replaced by whether the benefits of weight loss can offset its potential carcinogenic and other side effects? The FDA, which pays more attention to safety, quietly stands on the side of the sugar industry.

In addition to the public relations war, the sugar industry with overcapacity has publicly declared that it will continue to expand the use of sugar in the industrial market and diversify its products, such as detergents, water purifiers and tobacco industries. Secretly, the sugar industry used to collect evidence to drive competitors out of the market.

In the next 10 years, cyclamate was wiped out of the market, and saccharin was also branded as a potential carcinogen.

In fact, artificial sweeteners such as Abbasid and Acesulfame have been used for more than half a century and have been widely used. The production time of sucralose and erythritol is shorter, and it has been several decades. As long as it is within the normal edible dose range, safety can be guaranteed.

But once prejudice is formed, it is difficult to change. Even if evidence that contradicts it continues to emerge, people will turn a blind eye. For example, saccharin was removed from the list of carcinogens in 2000. And we still have controversy over saccharin.

Not only saccharin, but other types of sugar substitutes are also facing similar marketing difficulties. People are afraid of the sweeteners formulated in the laboratory.

Sugar substitutes can achieve undiminished sweetness and lower calories. However, whether long-term consumption will cause disease is still controversial in the academic circles. In 2019, Dr. Joerg J. Meerpohl of the University of Freiburg pointed out in a study that artificial sweeteners have no health benefits. But there is no evidence that they are any harm.

Or, as the food columnist Daniel Engeberg said, the fear of sugar substitutes may never come from scientific evidence, but from a sense of fatalism-every kind of happiness has its consequences.

Sugar substitutes are becoming a trend

The growing global obesity problem has given Sugar a bad reputation. Sugar substitutes are not only easier to be accepted by people who are worried about weight, but also cheaper than sugar.

The cost of sugar substitute is less than 10% of that of sucrose. Comparing the cost to achieve the sweetness of one kilogram of sucrose with the same sweetener, the price-sweet ratio of sucrose is 6 yuan/kg, while high-strength sweeteners, such as sucralose and acesulfame, have a price-sweet ratio of 0.3 -Around 0.7 yuan/kg.

According to this price-sweet ratio, in addition to the industrial use of sugar to extract ethanol, China consumes about 5 million tons of sugar each year. This part of the direct-to-consumer market is also a market of tens of billions if only 5% of sugar substitutes can be obtained.

To get rid of sucrose, sugar substitute manufacturers have to find ways to become the preferred additive for low-calorie foods, especially low-calorie beverages. About 60% of the sales of high-strength artificial sweeteners come from beverages.

When Coca-Cola's sugary carbonated beverages became less and less selling, it also tasted the sweetness from sugar substitutes.

On the one hand, governments of various countries have successively imposed sugar taxes. Coca-Cola made its decision as early as 2011. It also promised the British government that it would reduce the heat in the soda. On the other hand, market research data shows that consumer demand for low-calorie beverages and food is increasing year by year.

Since 2018, Coca-Cola has successively launched nearly ten new sugar reduction products. Since the second quarter of that year, Coca-Cola's low-sugar and non-sugar carbonated beverage products have grown at a rate of 12%. In the entire product line, 18 of the 20 best-selling products are low-sugar or no-sugar formulas.

In the past five years, this trend has also appeared in the Chinese beverage market. The new consumer brand Genki Forest hit the market with low-sugar sparkling water. At 618 hours on Tmall in 2019, its beverage sales once surpassed Nongfu Spring and Coca-Cola. It uses sugar substitutes, such as erythritol.

Vitality Forest, which sells more low-sugar sparkling water, drives China's sugar substitute industry

The wave of low-sugar craze set off by Yuanqi Forest has driven the entire A-share market to pay attention to the concept of sugar substitutes. In January of this year, erythritol producer Sanyuan Biology plans to go on the market. Three months later, another supplier, Baolingbao, once had a daily limit for two consecutive trading days.

In the face of different levels of regulatory pressure on sugar and changes in raw material prices in various countries, Coca-Cola and Genki Forest are also promoting the introduction of new products for sugar substitutes. Since the advent of Neotame in 1993, synthetic sweeteners have developed to the sixth generation. In China, there are currently 18 approved sugar substitutes.

18 sugar substitutes approved on the Chinese market

In the past, when scientists were looking for alternatives to sugar, they either extracted them from nature or synthesized them artificially, hoping to find sweeteners with higher sweetness and lower calories. The idea has not changed. They gradually reduce the sugar content of food and beverages and retrain your sense of taste.

With this idea, they have also explored a new way in the past few years-changing the structure of sugar itself. DouxMatok, an Israeli food technology company, enhances the sweetness of sugar by attaching sugar molecules to specific taste bud carriers and reduces the sugar content in food by as much as 40%.

The only good way to reduce the body's sugar intake is to eat less sugar. But out of instinct, few people can completely refuse the sweet temptation. And sugar substitutes are solving this dilemma.