Meet the Sweetener That Won’t Send Blood Sugar Soaring: Tagatose

One of life’s greatest pleasures is biting into a freshly baked, sugary-sweet cookie. The problem is that not everyone gets to indulge in such a simple joy because that sugar content can pose challenges for some, particularly those managing diabetes, insulin resistance, or watching their calorie intake. But hang on, because scientists are working to give you better access to a sweetener that could be a solution to all these issues.

In December, researchers, including some from Tufts University, published findings on a new method for producing tagatose, a rare sugar that could “provide the sweetness and natural taste of table sugar without its potential harms.” In fact, the team added in a statement, “It might even provide some health benefits.”

As the researchers explained, tagatose is a naturally occurring sugar found in dairy products and certain fruits, including apples, pineapples, and oranges. It’s an attractive sweetener because it’s approximately as sweet as table sugar, yet it’s about 60% lower in calories, and because its glycemic index is incredibly low, it elicits a much smaller rise in blood sugar than table sugar. However, the downside is that it is found only in very small amounts. Because of its rarity, it’s typically manufactured rather than naturally extracted. But maybe not for long.

“There are established processes to produce tagatose, but they are inefficient and expensive,” said Nik Nair, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Tufts. Nair added that the team developed a method to produce tagatose using an enzyme from slime mold (yes, that’s the scientific term), which acted as “tiny factories” to convert “abundant amounts of glucose into tagatose. This is much more economically feasible than our previous approach, which used less abundant and expensive galactose to make tagatose.”

And when they say “abundant,” they mean it. According to the team, the yield of tagatose using the bacteria could reach up to “95%, significantly greater and more cheaply attained than conventional manufacturing, in which yields only reach 40 to 77%.”

Beyond delivering a sweet taste with fewer calories, the researchers noted that the sweetener may benefit people with diabetes because it is only “partially” absorbed in the small intestine, with most of it fermented by gut bacteria, resulting in a much lower impact on insulin than table sugar.

Additionally, the sweetener is not only better for your teeth than table sugar but may also benefit your entire mouth. “Unlike sucrose, which fuels cavity-causing bacteria in the mouth, tagatose appears to reduce the growth of some of those bacteria, and evidence suggests it has probiotic effects to support healthy oral and gut bacteria,” the researchers explained in their statement, citing a 2021 study on tagatose and dental health.

They even gave a special shoutout to cooks and bakers, noting that tagatose makes a good “bulk sweetener” because it provides a similar cooking texture to sugar, a quality many artificial sweeteners lack. “It even browns like table sugar during cooking,” they added. “In taste testing, compared to other sugars and sugar substitutes, it has the most similarity to table sugar.”

Perhaps the best news of all is that tagatose has already been designated “generally recognized as safe” by the Food and Drug Administration, meaning it can be used in consumer foods right now. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for their more efficient version to hit the market, but for now, you can always get the more expensive option on Amazon.