On Food and Cooking

Notable Qualities

Bulking Ingredients: Sugar Alcohols The
most common ingredients that provide sugar-
like bulk are the sugar alcohols, or polyols —
chemicals whose names end in -itol — which
are essentially sugars with one corner of their
molecule modified (for example, sorbitol is
derived in this way from glucose). Small
amounts of some sugar alcohols — sorbitol,
mannitol — are found in many fruits and
plant parts. Because the human body is
designed to make use of sugars, not sugar
alcohols, we absorb only a fraction of these
molecules from food, and use that fraction
inefficiently: so they cause only a slow rise in
blood insulin levels. The rest are metabolized
by the microbes in our intestines, and we
obtain their energy indirectly. All told, sugar
alcohols provide 50–75% of the caloric value
of sugar.
Sugar alcohols don’t have the chemical