What Makes Sugar-Free Gum Sweet? | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 11)

Takes a lot more than just sugar to make gum sweet, so can I make my own gum sweetener from scratch without sugar?

Hit the stuff inside your stuff. Ingredients; the ingredients in this popular gum are, and the ones responsible for flavor are. Now let's decode this list.

We've got sugar, a different kind of sugar, a syrup whose main ingredient is that different kind of sugar. The thing that makes gum moist also happens to taste a little bit sweet. Not one, but two different artificial sweeteners. Oh, and some natural and artificial flavorings.

Now, all those sweeteners and sugars make up two grams of this 2.7-gram stick of gum. That is 74%. But before we go on a crazy rant about how much sugar there is in gum, remember that it's 2 grams. You're going to be fine.

But it does raise two interesting questions. One, if most of this stick of gum is sugar, then what the hell is in sugar-free gum? And second, why do I need six different types of sweetener in one piece of gum? The answers are related and fascinating.

So let's take a look at some of the ingredients in this popular sugar-free gum. Here's the clue list, and these are the ingredients responsible for flavor. So over here we have sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol, aspartame, and acesulfame potassium.

Now, of this list, you're probably most familiar with aspartame because it's what's in here. Acesulfame potassium is a different artificial sweetener. So you might be wondering why not just take all the sugars in a stick of gum and replace them entirely with one artificial sweetener?

It is, after all, what they do for this. Well, the artificial sweeteners are about 200 times as sweet as sugar, and that means that instead of the two grams-ish of sugar you use in a regular stick of gum, you only need about 0.01 grams of an artificial sweetener for the same level of sweetness.

And your stick of gum needs to stay about the same size. But there are other ingredients you can add to make up for that lost mass, and these ingredients are sorbitol, mannitol, and xylitol.

Now, these molecules are all generally called polyols, as in poly alcohol or sugar alcohols. Firstly, they are sweet. Xylitol is about as sweet as sugar, sorbitol is like 80% of sweet, and mannitol is about half as sweet as sugar.

And because they are not 200 times as sweet as sugar, that means that you can use more or less the same amount of a polyol in a sugar-free stick of gum as you would sugar in a regular stick of gum.

Now, chemically, the polyols are all extremely similar to each other and reasonably similar to glucose, with the key difference being here. Now let's talk about your mouth for just a second.

Bacteria in your mouth can transform regular sugars like sucrose and glucose into acids. Now, these acids are what cause cavities. But the lack of a double bond in polyols means that bacteria cannot metabolize polyols into acids, and that means no cavities.

This is why the FDA allows manufacturers to print "does not promote tooth decay" on the label of these sugar-free gums. Now, the coolest thing about polyols is that when they dissolve, they absorb energy.

So when you're chewing on a piece of sugar-free gum and the polyol starts dissolving in your saliva, they're actually absorbing energy in the form of heat from their surroundings, which in this case is your mouth. So they feel cold in your mouth, which is awesome if your gum is designed to promote a nice clean feeling.

So if the polyols are so cool, why do we even bother with aspartame or acesulfame potassium? Well, remember that most polyols are not as sweet as sugar. So if you replace all the sugar in a regular stick of gum with only polyols, you'll get gum that's not as sweet.

That brings up a related question: why do I need three different polyols and two different artificial sweeteners in one stick of gum? The answer is basically taste.

I mean, just because something tastes sweet doesn't necessarily mean it tastes like sugar. So manufacturers use different combinations of polyols and high-intensity sweeteners to achieve exactly the taste profile they're looking for. In this case, Spiel Aminta.

Now, that basically means trying a bunch of random stuff and seeing what tastes good. And that is exactly what I'm about to do. So I've got glycerol, xylitol, and stevia.

Now, all three of these come from plants. Xylitol is about as sweet as sugar, and stevia is about 160 to 250 times as sweet. So this stuff I'm going to use instead of aspartame or acesulfame potassium.

Now, I was also going to use sorbitol, but right before we shot this scene, my producer noticed some fine print on this bottle. It says "for rectal use only." Yes, sorbitol is also sold and used as a laxative, and as a laxative, you can either take it orally or through the other end.

And since this bottle is designed to be used in your butt, I'm not going to put it in my gum sweetener. So I'll just put that over there. I also have some peppermint oil and some pre-made gum base. This comes from chicle, and we did a whole episode on it, so I'll post the link below.

So let's just, let's get started. Okay, let's taste. Oh god, that is... oh my god, that's very minty. May have slightly overdone it on that, but I will up the sweetness, and hopefully, the gum base will deal with the mint.

But other than that, it's pretty close to real gum. Okay, moment of truth. There's like a barbecue smokehouse kind of flavor to it, like steak sauce. It is sweet, and it doesn't taste artificially sweetened, which is good.

But overall, mm-hmm, nope. No, overall I don't like it. So if you have thoughts on where I went wrong or ideas on how to improve, or if there's an episode you want to see me do, let me know in the comments or, you know, hit me up on Twitter.