The Sweetest Thing

Radiolab

Triggered by a question from his children, Latif Nasser embarks on a scientific investigation into the world's sweetest substances. The jour

Key takeaways

• Biochemist Eric Walters ranks sweeteners by potency, noting Advantame is 20,000 times sweeter than sugar.
• Lugdunum is theoretically 300,000 times sweeter than sugar but is not FDA approved for human consumption.

Main topics

• Artificial Sweeteners
• Sensory Perception

Notable quotes

The sweetest thing could be light.

Conclusion

Sweetness is revealed to be a complex intersection of chemical potency

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) Hey, it's Molly Webster hopping in here to tell you it is that time of the year when we ask for your financial support. for the show. We made it through our first year without federal funding, thanks in large part to you, our listeners, and we want to keep it going. So consider joining The Lab, our membership program. Membership starts at just $7 per month. It comes with extra perks like sponsor-free episodes, bonus content, members-only swag. We have got a new fanny pack coming out. It's beautiful. It is made of recycled cotton. It has extra pockets. An adjustable strap you can wear. as a fanny pack or as a chest pack. Get yourself or a friend a cool new piece of merch by going to radiolab.org slash join or you can text LAB to 83763 to make your donation. That's LAB to 83763. Thank you. Enjoy the show. Speaker 8 (0:55) Wait, you're listening? Okay. Speaker 2 (0:58) Alright. Speaker 7 (1:02) You're listening to Radiolab. Speaker 6 (1:05) Radiolab. From WNYC. Speaker 2 (1:08) See? Yep. Speaker 2 (1:12) All right. So Latif. Yeah. What are we doing today? Speaker 1 (1:16) We're going to go on a hunt. All Speaker 2 (1:18) right. Speaker 1 (1:18) That actually starts in my car. I was with my two kids. I think at that point, my kids were six and three, maybe. And the U2 song, The Sweetest Thing comes on. Do you know that song? Of course. Speaker 1 (1:38) Yeah, of course. Speaker 2 (1:40) It's a bop. Speaker 1 (1:40) Yeah. It's my favorite of their songs. Yeah. And my kids, who have never heard the song before, they're listening to the song, and they ask, what is the sweetest thing? Speaker 2 (1:51) Did you try love? Were you like, love? Speaker 1 (1:53) Yeah. No. My kids, they don't care about that. They were just like, no, no, no. But what really is the sweetest thing? Speaker 2 (1:57) So just, what's the sweetest thing I can get in my mouth? Speaker 1 (2:00) Yeah. They're kids. They love sugar. Yeah, of course. Right now, they're obsessed with gummy bears. And they just wanted to know. Is there some other thing out there we've never had before that's even sweeter? So I figured, like, I'm a journalist. I can answer this. Speaker 2 (2:16) Well, Latif, bless your amazing children who I adore. Do you care about this question? Speaker 1 (2:23) Yeah. Yes. Why? Because, okay, because it sounds like a dumb, simple question. Or not a dumb question, Speaker 2 (2:30) but it seems like it has an answer. And then you're like, son. I Speaker 1 (2:32) kind of expected it would be that way too. But then this question turned out to be so much more. More than just a hunt for like a substance. It became like this thing where I was trying to get to the edge of human experience. And sweetness as one of those experiences, it's this basic familiar thing that we all know. It's like almost mundane, but I kept finding that, wait a second, like, no, no, no, no. The edges even further to these levels of sweetness that I didn't even know existed in the first place. Speaker 1 (3:10) And there's some mind hacks and brain lasers and space raspberries. There's a lot of fun stuff along the way. All Speaker 2 (3:16) right. All right. Let's go. Speaker 1 (3:18) Okay. All right. So the very first thing that I found right off the bat, I found all these scientists. Check, check, check. Okay. Hey, okay. Hello. Who are out there. trying to answer rigorously scientifically this exact kid question. Speaker 3 (3:35) My name is Eric Walters. Can I call you Speaker 1 (3:37) Eric? Please Speaker 3 (3:38) do. Speaker 1 (3:38) You don't have to doctor me. Like Eric here, a biochemist who used to work at NutraSweet where he developed artificial sweeteners. Speaker 3 (3:45) I spent a lot of my career working on sweeteners, studying sweeteners, and ultimately writing a book about sweeteners. Speaker 1 (3:51) And what scientists like Eric in the food industry do is they find or even make Speaker 3 (3:57) new sweet... Yeah, yeah. Tweaking the structure in small ways and seeing, does it get better or worse? Speaker 1 (4:05) And then they literally rank them in terms of sweetness. Yeah. And they keep like a list of the sweetest things on Earth. Oh. And I want to walk you up my top five of the list using table sugar as our baseline here. Speaker 3 (4:18) Because that's the most common sugar that we use every day. Speaker 1 (4:22) Okay, great. So, number five. Speaker 1 (4:27) Honey. You know honey. Heard of it. Honey is about 1.5 times sweeter than sugar. Speaker 2 (4:32) Which, what does that mean? It's just, it's just, what Speaker 3 (4:35) does that mean? So typically in the food industry, people do this with trained taste Speaker 1 (4:40) panels. These specialized taste testers who are really good at noticing differences in sweetness. I Speaker 3 (4:45) haven't done it in years, but I used to be very good at it. And Speaker 1 (4:48) here's what they generally do. They take a little sugar. One gram of sugar. Like a pinch. Dissolve it in water. Call it a cup of water. Taste it. Sip and spit. Then they mix the same amount of the thing they're testing, let's say in this case honey, with the same amount of water. And again. Sip and spit. To see which is sweeter. Yeah. Now, to be able to say how much sweeter this thing is than sugar, what you do is you just add water. Until it's the same? Until it's the same. So like with honey, you would theoretically need to add 1.5 times as much water for them to taste the same. then you can say it's 1.5 times as sweet. Yep. There you go. Speaker 2 (5:29) That's a good way to, like, come up with a scale. Speaker 1 (5:33) Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:33) Okay. Speaker 1 (5:34) Okay, so that was honey. Honey was number five on the list. Now, one level sweeter, number four. Speaker 3 (5:41) Aspartame. Speaker 1 (5:42) Aspartame, which is used to sweeten equal. Sure, okay. It's about Speaker 3 (5:47) 200 times as sweet as sugar. So Speaker 1 (5:49) it takes 200 times more water. Wow. With aspartame to taste the same as a cup of sugar water. That's wild. Yeah. Next, number three. This one actually comes from nature. Ooh. This is a catempe fruit, which is a little red berry that grows in West African tropical rainforests. And it is 2,000 times sweeter than sugar. Speaker 2 (6:15) Oh, orders of magnitude. Speaker 1 (6:16) Yeah. But then, number two, adventame. How sweet? Just take a guess. 5,000. Adventame is... 20,000 times sweeter than sugar. Oh Speaker 2 (6:31) my gosh. Speaker 1 (6:32) That means just a pinch of Adventame could sweeten 500 gallons of water. That's like a jacuzzi of sugar. Speaker 2 (6:40) That's freaky. Speaker 1 (6:41) Yeah. Okay. Number one. The number one sweetest thing, according to these expert sweetness sippers sitting around in their food labs, is lugdunum. Yeah. I don't even know how to pronounce it. Lugdenum? I always say Lugdename, but I... Lugdename. Okay. This is 300,000 times sweeter than sugar. Speaker 2 (7:07) Oh. Yeah, Speaker 1 (7:09) that's what we said. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's insane. Speaker 2 (7:13) Okay, so what is this? This is Speaker 1 (7:15) a swimming pool. This is almost a full swimming pool. Speaker 2 (7:18) Wow. Speaker 1 (7:20) What was the mood and the reaction at NutraSweet to this news? I Speaker 3 (7:25) was jealous. Yeah. Wish I'd thought of that. Speaker 1 (7:27) Because in his line of work, they're always trying to push this limit a little bit further. Right. Speaker 3 (7:32) I discovered a sweetener that was 28,000 times as sweet as sugar. So I didn't win. I didn't win the prize on that