I was really disappointed that tagatose didn't come to market. What most people didn't understand is that real sugars like sucrose and tagatose contribute a lot of bulk to a product. You can't simply substitute something like sucralose to a baking recipe and expect the same results.
The other sugar substitutes also don't work in ice cream, because the freezing-point-lowering property of real sugar (what keeps your ice cream creamy instead of rock hard) depends on the number of molecules of sugar. The synthetic substitutes like sucralose are so sweet that you only need a little bit, and that isn't enough to lower the freezing point, so when you put the ice cream in the freezer, it turns into an icy chunk.
Tagatose was also supposed to have the same browning properties as sucrose.
Most of the other sweeteners are cut with either glucose or maltodextrin because they're so sweet that it would be difficult to measure them otherwise. This means you're almost always getting some carbs with your sweetener. Tagatose wouldn't have this drawback.
But I think the target audience for most of these sweeteners is not the diabetic patient; it's the soft-drink manufacturers, which buy the sweeteners in huge quantities. This is the market that didn't materialize.
There are no long-term studies of the use of tagatose in any quantity, and it's possible that if it had become popular, they would discover that it had some major drawbacks.
But the same can be said of all the new sugar substitutes, as well as the new insulins.
I was really disappointed that tagatose didn't come to market. What most people didn't understand is that real sugars like sucrose and tagatose contribute a lot of bulk to a product. You can't simply substitute something like sucralose to a baking recipe and expect the same results.
The other sugar substitutes also don't work in ice cream, because the freezing-point-lowering property of real sugar (what keeps your ice cream creamy instead of rock hard) depends on the number of molecules of sugar. The synthetic substitutes like sucralose are so sweet that you only need a little bit, and that isn't enough to lower the freezing point, so when you put the ice cream in the freezer, it turns into an icy chunk.
Tagatose was also supposed to have the same browning properties as sucrose.
Most of the other sweeteners are cut with either glucose or maltodextrin because they're so sweet that it would be difficult to measure them otherwise. This means you're almost always getting some carbs with your sweetener. Tagatose wouldn't have this drawback.
But I think the target audience for most of these sweeteners is not the diabetic patient; it's the soft-drink manufacturers, which buy the sweeteners in huge quantities. This is the market that didn't materialize.
There are no long-term studies of the use of tagatose in any quantity, and it's possible that if it had become popular, they would discover that it had some major drawbacks.
But the same can be said of all the new sugar substitutes, as well as the new insulins.