Hello, and welcome to the Nutrition Tiva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinegel, and today

we're talking about those foods we love to hate, or maybe hate to love. For a long time

now, we've had a love-hate relationship with junk food. On the one hand, we know those

empty calories aren't good for us. On the other hand, we love our sweets and our crispy

salty snacks, and food manufacturers love them too, because they're relatively cheap

to manufacture, they're extremely shelf-stable, and they're irresistible. Unlike fresh

fruits and vegetables, which continue to be a hard sell, sweets and snacks practically

sell themselves, and have a very healthy profit margin. But what if we could make those

snacks and sweets healthier? Wouldn't it be great if we could eat the foods we love

without the consequences? Two new ingredients seem to offer exactly that. Alulose is a rare

form of sugar that has only one-tenth of the calories of a regular sugar and a very low

glycemic impact. Now, this is not an artificial sweetener. It's a naturally-occurring sugar

molecule that's present in very small amounts and a few foods, including wheat and figs.

The food scientists have now figured out a way to mass-produce alulose from fructose,

using an enzymatic process, and you're soon going to be seeing this ingredient showing

up in processed foods in a big way. As a naturally-occurring sugar that's already present

in the food supply, it's presumed to be safe when consumed in moderate amounts. Although,

I have to say, our capacity for immoteration apparently knows no bounds. But in addition,

human and animal studies using this ingredient have raised no safety concerns, so the FDA

has given it the green light. Alulose is about 70% as sweet as regular

table sugar, but because it's largely unmetabolized, it provides virtually no calories. It does

have a little bit of that cool-on-the-tongue sensation that you might know from sugar

...