Andrew Rosenblum
Any one of us knows that soda, while delicious, is bad for your health. People who drink one or more sugary drinks a day tend to gain weight and are 26 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who don't. And that 's one reason why food companies sold more than $11 billion worth of diet soft drinks to Americans in 2020 alone.
Skepticism about sugar-free soda is growing. In May, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned against weight loss from consuming artificial sweeteners. Worse, the agency also found that long-term consumption of non-gutta sweeteners may actually contribute to type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. WHO recommended that people instead try to reduce their sugar intake.
But that's easier said than done when a gorgeous can of cold, bubbly yum is staring you in the face. I respect everything about those who use water, quinoa, and oranges.
A startup in Davis, California called Oobli is one of several companies pitching sweet protein substitutes as alternatives to sugar and bigur sweeteners, slipping a sweet protein called brazenein into an iced tea blend. Originally found in the bright red or mottled gray fruit of the Oubli fruit tree, brazzein is between 500 and 5,000 times more powerful than sugar. It contains no carbohydrates, so it doesn't have the metabolic complications of non-gourmet sweeteners, such as insulin spikes.
But for iced tea, which sells for a fairly steep price of $15 per six-pack, the company has to convince nutritionists and consumers that Brazzein can't just become another disappointing fad sweetener. The company needs consumers to acknowledge that its yeast has been grown in a lab via fermentation, courtesy of gene-edited yeast, for economic and ecological reasons. And then there's the matter of assurance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that it's safe. (The company worked with a third-party lab to publish a peer-reviewed study showing that the sweet protein was safe, confirmed by a panel of outside experts, allowing the product to be sold in the United States, but some retailers will not carry the product until the FDA issues a letter agreeing with this conclusion.)
The typical American consumes about 60 pounds of added sugar a year, nearly half of which comes from beverages.
“Today, 75 percent of U.S. consumers are actively trying to reduce sugar in their chocolate bars ,” said Ali Wing, CEO of Oobli. “There are 50 forms of sugar, and we’ve been trying to do it for the past 20 years and it’s not going well. They see an update every six weeks on yet another sugar alternative that may actually be worse for you than we thought. “Consumers are skeptical.”
But chocolate is only the beginning of the company's ambitions. Oobli sees sugary drinks as a really promising niche. The typical American consumes about 60 pounds of added sugar a year , nearly half of which comes from beverages. “This is a sugar transport mechanism,” says Jason Ryder, CTO and adjunct professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Beverages are the 800-pound gorilla of the problem,” says Wing, “and that’s why so many people have turned toward diet soda or sugar-free tea in the first place.”
More on the sweetener than meets the tongue
Decades of marketing have led us to believe that this zero-calorie drink is the equivalent of flavored water.
Ryder says artificial sweeteners trick your body into thinking it's sugar. Recent studies have shown that diet soda is bad for your health because it can stimulate food cravings or confuse your body . Obese women and people ate more in response to a sucralose-sweetened beverage compared to a control group that drank regular sugar. Sweet soda.
“Sugar and alternative sweeteners are a class; they are all small molecules, and they all do fundamentally the same thing,” he says. “They bombard your T1R2 and T1R3 taste receptors.” These molecules essentially overstimulate our systems so that they were rarely consumed, but are now ubiquitous.
Ryder says taste receptors on the tongue and in the gastrointestinal tract not only detect sweet tastes, but also perform important signaling functions. “They tell your brain, ‘Hey, we have sugar coming! Now it’s time to make insulin. We need to get the sugar into the bloodstream so we can get it to the cells that need it.’”
Ryder said this sensitivity to the presence of sugar evolution is due to its relative scarcity tens of thousands of years ago. In the summer, in addition to fruits, our Paleolithic ancestors derived only sugar from tubers, other starches and complex carbohydrates.
In contrast, our modern food system is full of simple sugars and sweeteners, effectively overloading the taste receptors in our tongue and intestines. Non-gourmet sweeteners, like aspartame in Diet Coke, act as a trick to trigger an insulin response even though these molecules aren't actually made up of actual sugars to collect.
“Something like aspartame can’t be metabolized properly, so you keep hitting an insulin response,” says Ryder. “But there’s no sugar to go in.”
So repeated trips of our insulin can lead to type 2 diabetes and many other problems. These include a potential link between long-term non-subscriber consumption of sweeteners and cardiovascular disease, disruption of the gut microbiome, colonization of beneficial bacteria and other organisms in the gastrointestinal tract.
Brazzein avoids this metabolic confusion because our bodies process proteins differently. It tastes sweet on the tongue, but it breaks down in our intestines without triggering an insulin response.
“They start to break down into peptides and amino acids,” says Ryder. “So while sugar and sucralose and aspartame continue to kick out the insulin response to all the taste receptors in the gut, proteins are already done.”
Nutritionists needed more data, but it's interesting
Nutrition experts who spoke with Proto.Life offered qualified support for Oobli's Brazzein as a way for Americans to reduce the calories they get from sugary drinks, but expressed a desire to see additional research before fully endorsing either product.
"Are there any health benefits to brazzein-sweetened drinks? Yes, they have fewer calories than regular sugar and have a lower glycemic load," says William Li, author of the book To Beat Your Diet . He also added that preliminary research suggests the protein has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, but no studies have been done to know what dosages are needed in humans. “It is therefore premature to speculate on benefits or potential long-term side effects,” he says.
Christina Fasulo, a senior gastrointestinal dietitian at UCLA, says brazjane appears promising as an alternative to the excessive amounts of sugar in the American diet. She also notes compelling laboratory and animal results showing Brazzein's antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects , but says she would like to see human studies before recommending the substance to patients.
Fasulo also doesn't go down entirely on diet soda, noting that the evidence against it has been inconsistent. A recent meta-analysis of 20 randomized controlled trials found that Bizhou sweetener actually helped cause weight loss and loss of fat.
Danica Cowan, a nutritionist at the University of California, San Francisco, agrees that sugar-sweetened beverages are a particular concern. That's because our bodies process liquid calories faster and we can drink sugary drinks much faster. “Most people aren’t going to eat five cakes a day,” she says. “But people can have five cans a day.”
Rather than asking patients to find sugar substitutes, Cowan typically tries to reduce the sweetness in their diets. That way, you get used to the lower level of sweetness in the food. If they can't cut out added sugar completely, she recommends naturally occurring sweeteners like stevia or monk fruit, but with the long-term goal of cutting out those substitutes completely, too. She advises her patients to get used to the natural sweetness of foods rather than using the distorted sweetness of our current food system as their default setting. And part of William Li's advice on Eat to Beat Your Diet is to give Willpower a chance. It's mostly water, tea, and sometimes fruit juice, along with a little juice from the list.
The sweetener of the future?
But for those who can't quit their afternoon sugary drinks, Oobli is one of several companies around the world that do.
“The last thing we want is for people to say, ‘I feel bad about eating my sweet tooth,’” said Oobli CEO Ali Wing.
Besides Oobli, there are passes from other competitors. Sweegen, Irvine, California, recently received “ GRAS ” certification to sell Brazzein as an industrial additive. Sweegen has gone into overdrive, “Sweetensify” its protein sweetener portfolio, touting the “ sweet synergy ” of Brazzein and another sweet protein called Thaumatin with its Stevia products.
“Every time we tried to find that silver bullet of the perfect low-calorie, ineffective sweetener, we fell short.”
The Israeli company based in rehovot was called Amai Proteins. They created a “designer” version of a naturally occurring sweet protein called monellin, and began testing it with Ocean Spray cranberry juice in 2020. A startup in Santa Monica recently called Nature's Wild Berry. $80,000 investment from Mark Cuban and Lori Grenier of Shark Tank , a startup pitch conference game show. The winning product was the freeze-dried "Miracle Berry," which the company grows in Florida. The key ingredient is a glycoprotein called miraculin that coats the tongue and gives even tart foods their unusually sweet taste. In what one judge on the show called a “parlor trick,” lemons, plain cranberry juice, and even cider vinegar tasted sweet despite having no sweet calories.
This seemingly guilt-free glut of protein is what worries nutritionist Danica Cowan. The sweet taste of non-giant sweeteners, which don't actually deliver sugar, is what creates more cravings, she says. “Every time we tried to find that silver bullet of the perfect low-calorie, ineffective sweetener, we fell short.”
But Ryder says tasting the sweet taste won't trigger a craving because your body metabolizes brazzein into protein. "As far as I know, there is no conclusive evidence that there are any long-term side effects, such as sweet cravings, from simply tasting sweet things. Too many of the known side effects come from the metabolism of the things themselves."
This certainly sounds plausible. But as nutrition experts say, we can't know for sure how consuming a can of Brazzein-Weeted Drink on a regular basis will affect your complex metabolic system over time without further research.
ecological justification
Ryder and Wing also make an environmental pitch for sweet proteins over sugar or non-gourmet sweeteners. Brazzein occurs only in small quantities in Oubli Berries of Pentadiplandra Brazzeana . Trees in river valleys and forest edges of the belt of tropical sub-Saharan Africa extending from northern Angola to eastern Nigeria. The abundance of these trees makes farming incredibly expensive. And even if Oubli fruit trees could be grown in orchards, large-scale farming would create the same deforestation problems as palm oil production in Indonesia or Madagascar. Ryder said farmers have planted 65 million acres of sugar around the world, many of them in sensitive tropical areas.
“For every 1% reduction in sugar, 650,000 acres of sugar cane land can replace more of the nutritious rainforest we have lost or overgrown.”
So Oobli turned to bioengineering and genetically modified yeast to produce brazzein, which is identical to the protein that grows naturally on trees. According to Ryder, the company has developed a scalable fermentation process: “A fermentation process that we have proven in the manufacture of sweet proteins at commercial scale in three countries.” This allows the company to have an economical source of sweet protein that won't allow forests to grow and grow crops.
And to this reporter's palate, the taste of Oobli's tea is imperceptibly sweet, without the strange "off" taste that Stevia and Synthetic sweeteners can have. I bought a 6 pack and my dessert oriented sons drank the rest. While it has the sweetness of a Snapple or Arizona Iced Tea Wallop on the palate, Oobli is seamlessly balanced and comes in a variety of lemon or peach tea flavors.
In other words, brazjane behaves differently than sugar in the mouth. There is a slight delay from when it hits the tongue to the perception of sweetness. Therefore, Oobli uses a small amount of sugar from agave in its tea so as not to confuse the tongue. However, the amount of added sugar is minimal. A can of Oobli iced tea has 7 grams of sugar, while a bottle of sweet snaps has about 46 grams.
Creating proteins in the lab that are hard to find in nature can feel like it goes against everything about the “nature” behind the organic food movement. Why can't people show limits and cut down on diet cola? Why can't they just embrace a fig cookie or savory pie instead, or a calorie-boosting beverage standby like coffee, tea, or water?
But in a country where 40% of adults are obese, appeals to personal responsibility and dietary morality feel pompous and inappropriate. Many of us Americans lack the limits to cut back. Or we simply don't care. We suck down soda like there's no tomorrow. And let's face it. That's millions of us. Synthetic biology may offer a way out. Creating hyper-sweet proteins in the lab may be the best way to help kick-start your calorie-drinking problem.
Originally published at https://proto.life .