How and from what is xylitol sweetener made? Its calorie content, beneficial properties and potential harm. What can you cook with sweetener?
Xylitol is a substance used as a sugar substitute in diets and foods. Its obvious advantage is naturalness. It is a part of many fruits, berries and other plant sources, and is also independently produced by the body in fairly large quantities - about 10 g per day. Xylitol is one of the first sweeteners, it has been used as a sweetener for more than half a century, which means that its properties have been thoroughly studied - both useful and potentially harmful.
Features of the manufacture of xylitol
It is noteworthy that the first industrial production of xylitol was organized by the Soviet Union, today the product is produced all over the world, and it is one of the most famous sugar substitutes.
The official name of xylitol is xylitol, in the industry it is registered as a food additive E967, which can be used not only as a sweetener, but also as a stabilizer, emulsifier and moisture-retaining agent.
It is produced most often from agricultural waste - corn stubs, cotton and sunflower husks, this allows the product to be put on the market at an affordable price, despite the fact that the technological stages of cleaning plant sources are very costly.
The process of chemical transformation itself is that xylose is extracted from raw materials (C5H10O5) - the so-called "wood sugar", and already xylose is reduced under conditions of increased pressure and temperature with the participation of a number of catalysts to the sweetener xylitol or xylitol (C5H12O5).
