And it has gotten worse lately. Many manufactures are doing half sugar and half artificial sweetener. And they never label it as such leading me to take a sip and promptly throw the rest away.
The sugar alcohols (like xylitol/erythritol/sorbitol/whatever-tol) are pretty darn close. Their problem is not so much taste as gastrointestinal upset though.
Yup, it's so superior that it seems ludicrous that others are considered comparable. The taste of it isn't quite like sugar, but it's close, and it's WAY better than any of the non-polyalcohol-sugar artificial sweeteners... and, IMO, is better tasting than isomalt, which comes second in tastiness to me, sorbitol 3rd place... I don't much like xylitol.
While it is technically a natural sugar alcohol, and can be refined from birch trees, most of the xylitol used in food products now is full synthetic or fermented with yeasts.
It is sweet. It is artificial (sometimes).
It may also draw additional water into your colon and have a "cool" mouth-feel, and it does add calories. Erythritol may be preferable for those reasons, even though it is less sweet. A common non-sugar sweetener mix is erythritol and stevia, which can, when proportioned correctly, add the same sweetness as an equal mass of refined sucrose.
Splenda is a totally different chemical compound, though, with a chlorine atom. The article makes it sound like it's still sugar but with a different physical arrangement of molecules.
Could it be air? Like, they physically structured the sugar granules to have tiny air pockets inside them? It doesn't necessarily have to be restructured at the molecular level...
This is the most plausible hypothesis I've heard since it's already been done with ice cream, and people actually enjoy and prefer the experience of it(despite the obvious downside of getting less Stuff).
The sugar in chocolate is dissolved, right? So there aren't any granules in the final product. They already mix air into most cheap chocolate-like candy products.
No, not fully dissolved. The sugar grain size is what determines smooth vs gritty mouth feel. There are micrographs on the harvard wiki, and in my video, linked from another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13087023
There are porous aggregate sugar grains already in use. It's not that they're full of air, just smaller than usual particles (so they dissolve faster) roughly clumped into normal sized agglomerations.
I guess I'm more cynical and skeptical of businesses which only have financial incentives in mind to do "good" things like this, but no ethical incentives.
Hershey has already done this quite a few times with their chocolate bars. They just get thinner and the texture gets waxier, I assume for structural integrity.
I'm shocked that this is the only mention of wax in the entire thread.
Last Hershey bar I tasted reminded me of those old novelty wax lips they used to give kids around Halloween. It's already to the point where you can actually taste the wax if you know the flavor.
