Okay, so one of the recurring themes from the emails that I keep getting from my readers are:

1. Why do you have so much time?
2. What’s the real difference between all the sweeteners?

Question one should be relatively self explanatory, so I’ll answer question two. The three main sugar substitutes that we humans have mainstreamed are:

Sweet n Low (saccharine)
Equal (aspartame)
Splenda (sucralose)

Saccharine is an artificial sweetener created back in the 1950′s by a father and son duo. They licensed the artificial sugar substitute to a company and called it “Sweet n Low.” That’s the pink packet you see in all the restaurants.

Then there’s Aspartame, another artificial sugar substitute discovered in the late ’60′s but introduced to consumers in the 1980′s. The most popular brand of Aspartame is Equal in the blue packet.

The final standard three artificial sugar substitute is sucralose, or what people commonly know as Splenda. Sucralose was created in 1976 but wasn’t mainstreamed in the US until the 1990′s.  What’s interesting about Splenda is that when they first launched their product, the tag line was, “Made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.” Now, because sucralose is artificial, that tag line could be a little misleading right? Well the people at Equal thought so too and sued Splenda. Result? Splenda’s tag line now says, “Starts with sugar, tastes like sugar, but is not sugar.”

So those are the old artificial sugar substitutes that we all grew up with. Now we have new kids on the block. We’ve got a selection of relatively new, natural products. We’ve got Erythritol, a natural sugar alcohol based sweeteners. We also have Stevia, like the ones made by Stevia Extract in the Raw: This all natural sweetener comes from the stevia plant.

These two newer sugar substitutes are all natural and were not developed from a chemist’s kit.  Even the sugar alcohol, Erythritol, is a naturally occuring thing. (Just because you’ve never heard of sugar alcohol before doesn’t mean it didn’t exist!!!)

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