times called artificial sweeteners, because they are made by human
chemists and not found “naturally” in nature.
The first such substance to become known was saccharin, discov-
ered in the late 1800s when a chemist inadvertently noticed that
something he had synthesized tasted sweet.
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SaccharinSaccharin is around three hundred times sweeter than sucrose. This
means that only a tiny pinch of saccharin, containing essentially
zero calories, can provide the same amount of sweetness to a food or
drink as would a spoonful of sugar. (Packages of saccharin and other
synthetic sweeteners contain more than a pinch of material because
they have additional white powders—such as the minimally sweet
polysaccharide maltodextrin—added to bulk up the volume.) Saccha-
rin presumably binds to the sweet receptor protein and activates it
much more strongly than does sucrose.
In addition to its sweetness, saccharin is experienced by many
people as having a slightly bitter taste. This is because the particular
molecular shape of saccharin interacts with one or more of the bitter
GPCRs, as well as with sweet receptors.
It wasn’t until many decades after the discovery of saccharin that
additional synthetic sweeteners entered the scene. Cyclamate was
discovered in the 1930s, and acesulfame and aspartame in the 1960s.
As was the case for saccharin, all these discoveries were accidental
—made by chemists working on things that had nothing to do with