[Sca-cooks] Left=hand sugar

[Edouard de Bruyerecourt]

Diamond Randall wrote:

> The thread on sweeteners in sports drinks reminded me of a product being
> developed about 10 years ago that was made from grain, termed "left-hand
> sugar".  I think Coca-Cola bought the rights to it or maybe it was General
> Foods, but generally to keep it off the market.  It was a chemical mirror
> image of a natural sugar molecule that acted in every way like natural sugar,
> it tasted, looked and cooked alike in equal one-on-one proportion to the real
> stuff.  But no living organism is capable of metabolizing it.  The mirrored
> configuration does not plug in and join up right to produce a metabolic (caloric)
> reaction.

Mmmm, I wonder if this is l-glucose, as opposed to d-glucose, more
commonly known as dextrose. Dextrose is a glucose molecule with an extra
water molecule added at a right angle. That right angle is the reason
for the dextro- prefix. All I recall of l-glucose is it had a respective
left hand turn in the molecule. But that 'left-hand sugar' may have it's
left hand turn either in the glucose molecule itself, or in the attached
water molecule.


> I suppose it probably is best that this product was sidetracked.  Imagine this
> product becoming extremely popular.  As it cannot be broken down in the body,
> everyone's urine would be as sweet as koolade.  Eventually the oceans would
> become  more sweet than salt.  Case in point that suggests this would be the
> case is the recent stream and river study that has detected trace amounts of
> steroids, antibiotics and other medical chemicals in the water supply in
> concentrations that can affect living organisms.  All of this comes from the
> amounts we ingest but do not utilize and subsequentally excrete.  These
> substances are probaly affecting the micro (and therefore macro) biosphere in
> ways we do not yet understand.

It's possible 'left-handed sugar' may or may not have sweetened the
Earth's water over time. Depends on what else might metabolized or
breakdown that specific chemical molecule. And since it's not naturally
occuring in that configuation suggests it may not be relatively stable.
Might also depend on how fast we consumed and excreted it versus how
fast the enviroment could break it down.

Imagine an application as bait for insects that are attacted to fruits
and sweet foods. They'd eat and eat, but starve to death....

BTW, as a social experiment, I went around the stores in this town I
live in and found I could make a meat-free, dairy-free, wheat-free bacon
double cheeseburger if I so wanted......

Edouard
Je suis, donc je serve.