Rare mono- and disaccharides as healthy alternative for traditional sugars and sweeteners?

Abstract

Obesity and type 2 diabetes are major health problems affecting hundreds of millions of people. Caloric overfeeding with calorie-dense food ingredients like sugars may contribute to these chronic diseases. Sugar research has also identified mechanisms via which conventional sugars like sucrose and fructose can adversely influence metabolic health. To replace these sugars, numerous sugar replacers including artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols have been developed. Rare sugars became new candidates to replace conventional sugars and their health effects are already reported in individual studies, but overviews and critical appraisals of their health effects are missing. This is the first paper to provide a detailed review of the metabolic health effects of rare sugars as a group. Especially allulose has a wide range of health effects. Tagatose and isomaltulose have several health effects as well, while other rare sugars mainly provide health benefits in mechanistic studies. Hardly any health claims have been approved for rare sugars due to a lack of evidence from human trials. Human trials with direct measures for disease risk factors are needed to allow a final appraisal of promising rare sugars. Mechanistic cell culture studies and animal models are required to enlarge our knowledge on understudied rare sugars.

Keywords:

• Rare sugars
• low calorie sweeteners
• diabetes
• metabolic health effects
• allulose
• sugar substitutes

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Ghent University researchers Prof. dr. Tom Desmet, Prof. dr. Tom van de Wiele, dr. Koen Beerens and ir. Davy van de Walle for their effort to provide a first peer-review on parts of this review within their field of expertise. We wish to thank FWO-Vlaanderen (Research Foundation Flanders) for the financial support.

Disclosure statement

Authors do not report any conflict of interests.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) under grant S003617N, as part of the SBO project ‘GlycoProFit’.