Can sugar be replaced by aspartame in all preparations?

Aspartame sweeteners, with a taste similar to sucrose, can be easily substituted for sugar to sweeten fruit salads, drinks and other types of "cold" preparations. On the other hand, aspartame is unstable by heat: the longer it is cooked, the more its taste will be denatured for a final result much less sweet than expected. This makes its use in cakes, cookies and other pastries quite problematic ... Other sweeteners such as sucralose, stable cooking, are much more appropriate. However, it is possible to use aspartame instead of sugar in some hot preparations: you must then add aspartame at the very end of cooking.

How to replace sugar with aspartame?

Aspartame has a sweetening power 200 times greater than sugar, so you should pay close attention to your dosage. To replace 100 grams of sugar, normally only 0.5 g of pure aspartame is needed. However, the vast majority of commercial sweeteners do not contain only aspartame, which reduces its sweetening power more or less slightly. Only solution: stick to the equivalence table, normally present on the packaging of the sweetener.

Can we replace sugar with aspartame safely?

The collective expertise of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in December 2013 concludes that aspartame is unsafe for the majority of the population, including pregnant women, infants and people with diabetes. Consumption of aspartame is dangerous for people with phenylketonuria (rare genetic disease). For the rest of the population, as long as the daily intake of aspartame does not exceed 40 mg / kg bw / day, it is normally possible to replace sugar with aspartame safely.