Pick a sweetener to suit your taste

With so many different sweeteners available, it can be difficult to know which one is best for your needs or, even more importantly, which one tastes best.

I decided to carry out a taste test with six different sweeteners, using 12 dietitians as my tasting panel. The sweeteners were disguised in homemade lemonade.

I asked the panel to consider the colour and clarity of the lemonade, its sweetness, whether there was an after-taste and whether the taste was ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘artificial’’, and to rank the sweeteners from their favourite to least favourite.

Interestingly, their favoured sweetener was white sugar. However, both Sweete (stevia) and Equal (aspartame) were consistently runners-up.

Stevia is a natural, nonnutritive sweetener which is made from the leaves of the stevia herb. In Sweete, it is granulated so that it looks like sugar. It can be added to hot drinks, smoothies or breakfast cereals.

Stevia is 250-300 times sweeter than white sugar, and is suitable for people with diabetes. It has a lower energy content (kilojoules/ calories) than sugar, and is glutenfree.

Marketed as Equal is the sweetener otherwise known as aspartame. It is an artificial sweetener made by joining two amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), aspartic acid and phenylalanine. Aspartame is fairly well known as the sweetener in diet soft drinks, cordials and yoghurt. It has about the same energy content as sugar, but is many times sweeter so only a tiny amount is needed. It isn’t suitable for baking, but can be used, like stevia, in hot drinks, smoothies and on breakfast cereals.

Norbu, a relatively new addition to the range of sweeteners in the supermarket, elicited the most extreme responses in my taste-test, with more than half ranking it their least favourite, but onequarter ranking it as the best!

In conclusion, while there were a couple of ‘‘favourites’’ among the sweeteners tested, our tastes were quite subjective despite the ‘‘blind’’ aspect of my experiment.

One participant did discover that the sweetener she had been buying for a family member tasted ‘‘hideous’’ and quickly set that right.

My advice is to taste several different sweeteners, and keep trying until you find a sweetener that agrees with your palate.