Acesulfame Potassium/Ace-K (Is it really this common to taste chemicals?)
3rd August 2006
Early readers will remember that one of my favorite things about artificial sweeteners is that they seem to often be discovered by accident. Apparently acesulfame is no exception:
Artifical sweeteners fall into two broad classes, “nutritive” and “non-nutritive.” Nutritive ones have some food value (Calories or kilojoules). The best example of this is aspartame, which is a peptide and actually has the same ~4 Calories/gram as sugars. It is a dietetic sweetener because it is many times stronger than sugar, so you get a negligible amount of Calories - just under one in most 12oz/355mL diet sodas, so most are labeled as zero calories (or, in one memorable case, they chose to round up, giving “one awesome calorie.” Why not the usual couple hundred, then, eh?)
Acesulfame is a “non-nutritive” artifical sweetener. It shares this designation with saccharin and cyclamate, among others. I am completely uninformed as to structure-taste relationships - it makes sense to me that, say, sucralose tastes sweet, since it’s structurally so close to a sugar. Aspartame I don’t get. Acesulfame, saccharin, and cyclamates, either. You’ll notice that they all share a common structural feature, a sulfamic acid moiety. Couldn’t tell you why, though. Anyone?
August 5th, 2006 at 11:14 am
they have a slight idea of sweetness SAR, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetness . seems you need some 3d combination of a hydrophobic bit, a lewis base and a H-bond acceptor. the sulfamate takes care of the base requirement i’d say.
August 5th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
And the HBA. It’s odd that so many sweeteners are hydrophobic, while sugars with much hydrophobicity are rare. And then there are the oddballs - BeCl2?? Pb(OAc)2??