What are the uses of erythritol?

Erythritol is a bulk sweetener with a refreshing taste. It has pure sweetness and a sweet stimulation close to sucrose. It can be mixed with powerful sweeteners to improve the sweetness quality. Because of its low solubility and easy crystallization, it is especially suitable for foods that require extremely fine sucrose crystal grains, such as chocolate. Other applications include tabletop sweeteners, confectionery, preserves, beverages and dairy products. 

Application of erythritol in food industry

As a new functional food sweetener that has just started in the world, erythritol has the characteristics of low hygroscopicity, low caloric value, good crystallinity, non-dentitogenicity, and is suitable for diabetic patients as well as unique physiological and metabolic characteristics and has a wide range of uses in the food industry. Due to the good heat and acid stability of erythritol, it will hardly cause browning or decomposition under general food processing conditions, and it will not cause browning when boiling at high temperatures during hard candy production. This has a great impact on the quality of chocolate. The high thermal stability of erythritol allows refining to be carried out at higher temperatures, which can further promote the formation of chocolate flavor and improve the quality of the product. Erythritol has poor hygroscopicity. Under high humidity conditions, it is not easy to absorb moisture even in an environment with a humidity of more than 90% . This feature is particularly important in food processing such as chocolate and chewing gum. Experiments show that when 10g of erythritol is dissolved in 90g of water, the temperature can drop by 4.8C .When 17g of erythritol is dissolved in 100 ml of water at 22 °C, the cooling effect is about 6 °C. The high heat absorption of erythritol makes the product have a lasting refreshing and cooling feeling after consumption, which is useful for improving the properties of chewing gum, refreshing solid drinks and candies. 

Erythritol has a refreshing sweetness, and when combined with high-intensity sweeteners such as protein sugar and stevia, it can effectively mask the bitter taste of these sweeteners ; erythritol can also reduce the odor of alcohol and improve the taste and flavor of distilled liquor and wine. It can be used in vegetable juice drinks to effectively suppress the unique bad taste of vegetable drinks; when added in drinking coffee, it can effectively suppress the astringent taste of coffee. Erythritol's heat resistant and acid resistant properties make will not affect the appearance and quality of beverages using erythritol as a sweetener  in sterilization processes such as pasteurization, high temperature or ultra-high temperature.

Application of erythritol in the production of medicines and health care products

Erythritol has very low calories and is known as a " zero " caloric value sweetener. Therefore, it can be used to produce various low-calorie health foods, weight loss foods and beverages. Due to the special physiological metabolism mechanism of erythritol and its features of not affecting blood sugar,it can be used to develop functional foods or beverages for patients with glucose discomfort such as diabetes. The erythritol has anti-caries properties, which cannot be utilized by pathogenic bacteria such as Streptococcus mutans. Therefore, candies and special tooth cleaning products made of erythritol have a positive effect on protecting children's oral health. In the pharmaceutical industry, erythritol can be used as a flavoring agent for medicines and an excipient for tablets, which can effectively improve the taste of medicines. Recent studies have also shown that erythritol derivative – dodeerythritol has anti- HIV activity. Nitroerythritol generated after the nitration of erythritol can be used to treat cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and asthma patients.