Methyl aspartame, commonly known as aspartame, is an important sweetener. The chemical formula is C14H18N2O5. It exists in the state of white powder at room temperature. It is a natural functional oligosaccharide with high sweetness, not easy to deliquescence, and no caries. It can be eaten by diabetic patients. Because of its extremely low calorie and high sweetness, aspartame can be added to beverages, pharmaceutical products or sugar-free chewing gum as a sugar substitute. The calorie of aspartame is about 16.75kJ/g, and 2.8 mg/dl of aspartame can make people feel sweet, so the heat generated by a small amount of aspartame can be ignored.
Aspartame is widely used in pharmaceutical processing and food processing. It has a refreshing, sucrose-like sweetness without the bitterness or metallic aftertaste that artificial sweeteners usually have, which is an important advantage.
In food and soft drinks, aspartame is usually 180 to 220 times sweeter than sucrose. Overall, the relative sweetness of aspartame was inversely correlated with the control sucrose concentration and varied with different flavor systems, pH, tasting temperature, and sucrose or other sugar concentrations.
Aspartame has a synergistic effect on certain food and beverage flavors, especially sour fruit flavors. The sensory evaluation concluded that it synergized better with natural flavors than with synthetic flavors. In some foods, this flavor-enhancing feature can reduce the amount of aspartame used, and can also meet some special needs of products such as chewing gum. Aspartame-based chewing gum lasts four times longer than sucrose. When aspartame is mixed with some slightly less sweet sweeteners or some salts, it is easy to change its lingering sweetness characteristics and taste, which must be paid attention to when formulating food.
Its safety is very important. However, the use of aspartame has potential safety hazards such as low immunity and brain tumors. Although some sweeteners on the market have been replaced by aspartame with relatively high safety sweeteners such as glucose syrup, their applications are still very extensive, especially excessive use may affect people's life safety.
Aspartame can be combined with intense sweeteners or carbohydrate-based sweeteners, further expanding its range of applications. When aspartame was mixed with carbohydrate-based sweeteners such as sucrose, fructose or glucose, the energy of the product dropped considerably without a change in sweetness. When aspartame is mixed with strong sweeteners such as saccharin, cyclamate, acesulfame potassium or stevia, the product sometimes has a slightly bitter taste, which can be improved by increasing the proportion of aspartame in the mixture Improvement, the degree of improvement increases with the increase of the proportion of aspartame. The synergistic effect of mixed sweeteners is related to the proportion of each constituent sweetener and the food ingredient system
