You will come into contact with sugar alcohol when you start to search for some sugar-free, diet-friendly or low-carbohydrate products. When you look at the label of these products such as soft drinks, gums, cookies and sugar-free candy, you are likely to see words such as maltitol, manitol, sorbitol and xylitol. All of them are sugar alcohols.
What is sugar alcohol
Sugar alcohol, also named as polyol, is sugar-free sweeteners that are carbohydrates but not sugar. Sugar alcohol has fewer calories per gram than sugar: sugar has 3 calories per gram, while sorbitol has 2.6, xylitol has 2.4, and mannitol has 1.6. Scientists call it sugar alcohol because part of the structure chemically resembles sugar and part chemically resembles alcohol.
Sugar alcohol occurs naturally in plants. Some of them are extracted from plants. For example, sorbitol is extracted from corn syrup and mannitol is from seaweed. However, they are mostly manufactured from sugars and starches.
Continue Reading…