Unsweet Sweetener Alternative: A Miracle?

After reading the HFCS article and realizing just how much of our food is essentially tainted with the sweetener, I remembered an experience I had this past summer at a small party. My friend showed up late and brought with him a grocery bag full of sour and bitter foods such as vinegar, limes, tomatoes, and tonic water, along with a packet of pills he had bought on EBay. The chemical inside those pills was a protein called miraculin, an extract of the miracle berry. This little pill made the limes taste like limeade, the vinegar taste like apple juice, and the tonic water taste like Sprite. My favorite food that night was the tomato which tasted like nectarines.

The first report of miraculin in the U.S. was published in Science in 1968. The researchers took the pulp of the miracle berries and used 4 subjects to qualify the sweetening effects by comparing citric acid solutions to sucrose solutions. Chromatography was used to determine the amount and purity of miraculin in the berries. 10mg of the protein was found in 300 berries. The protein’s effects are very stable at a pH around 4 for long periods of time but are destroyed by heat above 100 degrees celcius, pH above 12 or below 2.5. The active pH areas are in the region of most acidic foods. The protein itself was found to be tasteless but was found to make acidic foods significantly sweeter.

While the exact mechanism isn’t certain, the literature suggests that the protein modifies the taste buds temporarily and causes sweet receptors to fire instead of sour receptors in the presence of acidic food. To be able to achieve sweetness in a food without adding all of the calories of HFCS or using engineered artificial sweeteners, but rather tricking the body into thinking something is sweet is an entertaining thought. This was thought to be a breakthrough for sweetening agents in food in the 1970’s. The Miralin company began testing the sweetener for marketing and quality, but their proposal for the sweetening agent was denied by the FDA. Currently it is not allowed in food in the U.S. but is legal in Japan.

http://www.jbc.org.proxy.library.emory.edu/cgi/content/abstract/263/23/11536
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.library.emory.edu/sici?sici=0036-8075(1968)161:3847%3C1241:TPFMF%3E2.0.CO;2-
http://health.howstuffworks.com/flavor-tripping1.htm