Sweetest Artificial Sweetener Yet Earns Approval

A new high-intensity artificial sweetener has been approved by federal regulators as a substitute for natural sugar. The product is called advantame and is the sweetest of all high-intensity artificial sweeteners so far.

"Sugar substitutes are called 'high-intensity' because small amounts pack a large punch when it comes to sweetness," Andrew Zajac, director of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) division of petition review, explained in a statement.

And advantame - which does not have any brand names associated with it so far - packs the biggest punch yet.

A single gram of advantame is reportedly 20,000 times sweeter than a standard gram of table sugar, the Los Angeles Times reports, making it the sweetest of all FDA-approved sweeteners.

The product - which comes in powder form - also has no significant caloric count and does not break down when exposed to high temperatures, making it ideal for baking and non-alcoholic beverages.

However, this also means that it cannot be approved for use when cooking meat or poultry, and will most likely be used as an industrial ingredient rather than for personal use, according to a constituent update released by the FDA and the Center for Food Safely and Applied Nutrition.

So why the high-intensity? According to the FDA, advantame can serve as a replacement for one of the five preexisting high-intensity sweeteners called aspartame.

"People who have phenylketonuria (PKU), a rare genetic disorder, have a difficult time metabolizing phenylalanine, a component of both aspartame and advantame," the organization explained in a statement. " Foods containing aspartame must bear an information statement for people with PKU alerting them about the presence of phenylalanine. But advantame is much sweeter than aspartame, so only a very small amount needs to be used to reach the same level of sweetness."

Small amounts of phenylalanine pose a significantly lower risk to people with PKU, allowing them to enjoy artificially sweetened products without worry of what may be inside it.

Advantame won federal approval on May 19 after data from 37 animal and human studies verified the product's safety.