Recent advance in technological innovations of sugar-reduced products

Abstract

Sugar is crucial as an essential nutrient for humans as well as for providing texture, sweetness and so on to food. But with the rise in people’s pursuit of health, it is becoming increasingly clear that excessive consumption of sugar can locate a load on the body. It has been that excessive sugar is associated with many diseases, such as dental caries, obesity, diabetes, and coronary heart disease. Therefore, researchers and industries are trying to reduce or substitute sugar in food without affecting the sensory evaluation. Substituting sugar with sweeteners is alternatively becoming the most traditional way to minimize its use. So far, the sweeteners such as stevia and xylitol have been are commercially applied. Several studies have shown that technological innovation can partially compensate for the loss in sweetness as a result of sugar reduction, such as cross-modal interactions that stimulate sweetness with aroma, nanofiltration that filters disaccharides and above, enzyme-catalyzed sugar hydrolysis, and microbial fermentation that turns sugar into sugar alcohol. This review summarizes these studies to enhance the safety and quality of sugar-reduced products, and will provide some theoretical frameworks for the food industry to reduce sugar in foods, meet consumers’ needs, and promote human health.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Reducing sugar
• hazard of sweeteners
• cross-modal interactions
• nanofiltration
• hydrolysis sugar by enzymes

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Key R&D Projects of Zhejiang Province of China (2019C02081) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32202044).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.