Sugar substitutes are synthetically or natural produced sweeteners, which have significantly more sweetening power than normal sugar. The relative sweetening power of a sweetener is measured by the comparison to sucrose, the common sugar, for which the value is set to 1. For artificial sweeteners this value goes from 10 up to 10,000. There are also sweeteners which go even higher, for example Lugduname which has a sweetening power of 220,000 to 300,000, but it is not approved as consumable in the most countries. An advantage of these substances is that they are nearly free from calories, what makes it usable for light and dietary food. In opposite to sugar, they cause no caries. Again and again there are discussions about the dangers of artificial sweeteners, but there are no real studies which really prove their harmfulness.
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