最甜的物质是什么？ What is the sweetest compound?

Most scales use sucrose as a sweetness of 1, and compare the relative sweetness of other sweeteners to sucrose.

Name              Relative Sweetness           Category 
D-Glucose                 0.46            Natural Food Product
Lactose                   0.68               "      "     "
D-Fructose                0.84               "      "     "
Sucrose                   1                  "      "     "
Cyclamate                30               EC Permitted, USA Prohibited
Aspartame               200               EC, USA Permitted.
Saccharin               300               EC Permitted, USA Prohibited
Sucralose               650               Au, Ca Permitted, trials elsewhere
Alitame               2,000               Undergoing trials
Thaumatin             3,000               EC permitted, US chewing gum only.
Carrelame           160,000               Guanidine sweetener
Bernardame          200,000                   "        "
Sucrononate         200,000                   "        "
Lugduname           220,000                   "        "

The guanidine sweeteners are not expected to be approved for food use. There are several other important attributes of sweeteners, such as low toxicity, no after-taste, whether metabolised or excreted, etc., that must also be considered.

The potency scale is fairly flexible, and differing publications can assign different values. The August 1995 copy of the Journal of Chemical Education contained several papers from a symposium on sweeteners [3,4], and an article in Chemistry and Industry also discusses sweeteners from both natural and artificial sources [5], and Kirk Othmer has a monograph on sweeteners.

The sweetener used in "diet" beverages is usually Aspartame, and they are usually required to display a warning for phenylketurics that the product contains a source of phenylalanine. As Aspartame slowly degrades in acid solutions, such products also have a "use-by" date. Although banned by the FDA in 1970 ( because a mixture of saccharin and cyclamate caused tumours in test animals ), saccharin has been still marketed under extensions of approval, Ironically, subsequent work implicated the saccharin, and the cyclamate was found not to be the tumour-causing agent, but it is still banned.