When Shakespeare wrote “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” in Romeo & Juliet, I bet he never thought some uppity blogger would mess with it as I’m about to. (image source) Watch this:

The sentiment is all well and good for smell (and matters of the heart, which is what Bill meant), but what about matters of taste? By that I mean tastes that tend towards sweetness… call it something else, and is it still the same game? That might be true of the usual suspects: Sugar. Honey. Agave nectar. Maple Syrup. Fructose. Maltose. Lactose. etc (some of the “etc” found here), as the list goes on… They all help answer the call for sugary satisfaction, with varying degrees of controversy, myths and legends attached. And if you were nerdy like I am, you might have looked at thesaurus.com for synonyms of “sweet” and seen that one of them is “delicious”. Indeed!

So what happens, then, when we start adding to the “tastes that tend towards sweetness” with Saccharin (aka Sweet ‘n’ Low)? Aspartame (Equal or Nutrasweet, molecule at right thanks to Wikipedia)? Sucralose (Splenda)? Acesulfame-Potassium? (I’m amused by the fact that Thesaurus.com also included “saccharin” as a synonym for sweet…) Is this a rose by another name, or have we moved more into carnation territory?

To me, the sweet-ishness that’s derived from chemicals does not taste as sweet. And I have plenty of experience to back that up… I used to be a mega-Diet Coke (or, “DC” as we addicts sometimes called it) drinker. And believe me when I say MEGA: in the early days of grad school, I was able to kill 2 litres of DC a day easily. I basically treated Aspartame like a food group…

While we’re at it, did you know that Aspartame isn’t even sweet? It’s two amino-acids that make your brain *think* it’s having something sweet, but it’s not. So if you want to confuse the ever-loving bejeesus out of your body, kicking back a DC (image source) when you have a sweet craving, like I did, is a good way to go about it. These days I’d say that if I want something sweet, and it’s more than a passing craving, then giving my body a little something sweet (but like fruit, so you also get fibre and nutrients) is the best way to go.

Back then, I’d say “maybe Vanilla DC?” (image source) Or “DC with lime” if I was feeling edgy… so it would throw my body out of whack because instead of giving it a little something sweet, I’d give it two amino acids plus artifical crap, which did absolutely nothing to quiet the desire for sweet. Yarg.

• As an aside: I was entertained by this post at The Frisky “A Social History of Diet Coke“. And this is the most authoritative things I might ever write on this blog, but: THE POST IS ACTUALLY NOT A SOCIAL HISTORY. A social history is, by definition, a history of a society or people. This article is a PRODUCT HISTORY, because it’s about DC. And while I might be able to anthropomorphise EVERYTHING, that still won’t make a history of DC a social history as that article suggested. End rant.

I gave up the DC about 6 years ago when I had a series of stomach issues. Once I was cleared to consume brown fluids again I found that… wow. I didn’t like the stuff at all… and I’ve never looked back.

But these days, as we know, I do have that little matter of my sometimes-sugar-madness… and it’s bad news. I’m definitely not down with the fake stuff, though. Aspartame and I have fully parted company, and I’m not going to replace it with anything else.

But white sugar (image source) is highly refined, and generally touted as the bad boy of sweets: it tastes good, but it will hurt you in the end. From raising insulin levels to depressing your immune system, it’s not getting good press lately.

With this in mind, and knowing that both as a baker and having a sweet tooth I’d at some point or another want to add a little je ne sais quoi (OK, OK, I know very well quoi) to my foods, I began to consider alternatives to refined white sugar.

(When I’m back in Hinterlandia and I have my copy of Heidi‘s Super Natural Cooking in front of me (the binding of which fell apart during its FIRST USE, arg arg arg), I’ll update on the ills of refined white sugar.)

Basically, looking at other natural sweeteners that aren’t refined within an inch of their lives comes down to a fair bit of lateral jockeying: they’re all still going to be calorie-dense (because sweet things always are!), which isn’t a plus if you, like I, are looking to decrease in mass. But I’ll still indulge from time to time, so there’s no sense in ignorantly ignoring some other candidates.

Part Deux coming soon… until then: what’s your favourite sweetener?