New sweet protein holds out hope for diabetics

Ninety-nine percent of all fruits in the world derive their sweetness from sugar. But there are a dozen or so fruits that grow along the equatorial belt that contain a sweet protein, rather than a sugar. What if that protein could be turned into a commercial product? Proteins used as a sweetener would have significant advantage over added sugar: they’re digested by the body just like any other protein in the GI tract, they don’t raise your blood sugar or insulin levels, they steer clear of your liver, don’t burden your kidneys, nor do they affect the microbiome in the same way as sugar.

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That means a protein-sweetened candy bar would not contribute to diabetes or obesity as would its sugary cousin. That’s what Ilan Samish was thinking when he first learned about thaumatin, the sweet protein in katemfe, a plant which grows primarily in Nigeria. “The world is spending huge amounts of money to cure disease,” he tells ISRAEL21c, pointing to how obesity has been classified by the World Health Organization as a global epidemic. “But we’re not focusing on curing the food that’s causing the disease. We need to cure the food rather than cure the disease.” Telling people to cut down on their sweets doesn’t work, Samish says. “Sweetness makes people happy. So we need to find a way to allow people to enjoy themselves, but in a healthy way. Now we have a way to do just that.” Samish wasn’t the first entrepreneur to think about harvesting sweet protein-containing fruits, but other companies have run into obstacles: the costs of picking and shipping the fruits to a lab (from Africa to somewhere in the west, as is usually the case) and then extracting and processing the protein into a powder can be prohibitive. -- More...

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