« August 05, 2005 | home | August 10, 2005 »

8 August 2005

The science of fake sweet

Rosie Mestel of the L.A. Times takes six pages to tell you everything you ever wanted to know about sugar replacements, but never knew you wanted to know it.

For example, artificial sweetners are a $1 billion market in the U.S. alone, and there are currently only five available, of which sucralose (400 times sweeter than sugar) is the most popular and neotame (7,000-13,000 times sweeter) is the newest. As you would expect, the Sugar Association hates fake sugar and calls them all a bunch of liars, LIARS, and other not-so-sweet names. The Times also includes a helpful sweetness timeline starting on page 5, telling me that saccharin was accidentally discovered in 1879, and the first diet soft drink was No-Cal, a sugar-free ginger ale.

What does the future of non-fattening sweetness taste like? Pretty much like it does now, but they’re working on getting a non-sugar sweetner to have the same chemical properties as sugar so that when you cook with it, the right sort of textures and crispy carmelizing things happen.

Posted by Lance Arthur at 02:30 PM Contact the author

Treating alcoholism with drugs

Next month, the FDA is expected to approve Vivitrex for use by alcoholics. Vivitrex is a once-a-month injection containing the drug naltrexone which blocks pleasure pathways in the brain associated with alcohol addiction. Those that have been on the medication during ten years of clinical study report that, yes, it really works.

Alcoholism has often been seen as more of a moral failing or character flaw than a treatable disease, and alcoholics have had to treat it by denying themselves the thing their body constantly craves through AA meetings, counseling and therapy. You can’t just tell an alcoholic they shouldn’t drink — they already know that better than you do.

Vivitrex works like a time-release pill, diffusing in the body over a period of time so that the patient doesn’t have to remember to take a daily pill. It’s not a cure-all by any means, but use of the drug cut the average number of heavy drinking days in alcoholics from 19 days a month to three, and 88% of patients in clinical trials wanted to continue treatment.

Posted by Lance Arthur at 11:38 AM Contact the author