Sugar Substitute Sends Shockwaves Through the Food Industry

It goes without saying that a high-sugar diet over time often results in a barrage of symptoms such as increased risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. A new sweetener named rare sugar has come onto the scene with claims that it will not only eliminate the harmful effects of sugar overdoses, but is even beneficial to the human body.

In 1991, an Agricultural faculty member at the Kagawa University discovered a microorganism that carries the key enzyme necessary for converting fructose into rare sugar in the university's own soil. Rare sugar, as the name suggests is a sugar that occurs in very small quantities in nature. A decade later, Professor Ken Izumori officially began leading a team to research the possibilities of commercializing rare sugar in a lab environment. Rare sugar contains almost no calories, yet is said to be 70 percent as sweet as regular sugar. As a matter of fact, lab results have shown that rare sugar contains blood sugar management capabilities by inhibiting a spike in blood glucose. Moreover, this sweetener substitute can even boost resting energy expenditure during darkness, raising the possibility that rare sugar may actually play a proactive role in fighting obesity.

In 2011, rare sugar was formally introduced to the local Kagawa Prefecture and rolled out to the rest of Japan in 2012. With increasing health awareness, both nationally and globally, rare sugar has been praised as a healthy substitute for conventional sugar. Since then, the designated research team at Kagawa University has partnered up with Japan's leading health food manufacturer, Matusutani Chemical Industry to introduce the sweetener into a range of products from salad dressing to soft drinks. Currently, a majority of these products on the market contain only 15 percent rare sugar, but the industry has expressed hopes in developing products that contain 100 percent rare sugar as their sugar content in the near future. Since its debut in Japan, this surprising sweetener has been exported into the mainstream of a few Asian countries, and within a few years, rare sugar is expected to make its way into Western markets, forever changing the way we eat.