Maltitol, Stevia, Sucralose: What the Sweeteners in Singapore Snacks Actually Do

You pick up a packet that says sugar-free, flip it over, and the ingredients list reads like a chemistry set: maltitol syrup, sorbitol, steviol glycosides, sucralose. It sounds alarming. In practice, most of these are ordinary, approved ingredients doing a fairly boring job — but they are not interchangeable, and a few of them behave in ways worth knowing about before you eat half a packet at your desk.

Here is what the sweeteners in Singapore snack aisles actually do.

There are two different families, and the label doesn't separate them

Almost every sugar substitute you'll meet falls into one of two groups.

Sugar alcohols (also called polyols) are the ones ending in -itol: sorbitol, maltitol, xylitol, erythritol, isomalt, mannitol. According to the Hong Kong Centre for Food Safety's overview of sugar alcohols, these are carbohydrates whose structure resembles both sugar and alcohol, though they contain no ethanol. They occur naturally in small amounts in fruits and mushrooms, and are manufactured at scale from sugars and starches.

Non-nutritive sweeteners are the intensely sweet ones used in tiny quantities: aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame K, saccharin, and plant-derived steviol glycosides. The Singapore Food Agency describes these in its guide to non-nutritive sweeteners as sweetening agents that deliver sweetness with few or no calories, whether artificially made or naturally derived.

On a Singapore ingredients list they sit side by side with no visual distinction. But nutritionally they are quite different animals.

Sugar alcohols are not calorie-free

This is the most common misreading. The Centre for Food Safety's figures put sugar alcohols at roughly 0.2 to 3 kcal per gram, against about 4 kcal per gram for table sugar. Maltitol — the workhorse of sugar-free biscuits and chocolate because it is about 90% as sweet as sugar — comes in at around 3 kcal per gram. That is a reduction, not an elimination.

And because sugar alcohols are less sweet than intense sweeteners, manufacturers have to use a lot of them to get the same effect. A "sugar-free" biscuit can carry 15–20g of maltitol per serving. The energy line on the nutrition panel will still reflect that, which is why the calorie count on some sugar-free products is barely lower than the regular version.

The genuine upsides: sugar alcohols are absorbed slowly and incompletely, so they produce a smaller blood glucose rise than sucrose, and they don't feed the mouth bacteria that cause tooth decay. That's why they dominate sugar-free chewing gum.

The part nobody warns you about: the laxative effect

Because sugar alcohols aren't fully absorbed in the small intestine, the leftovers travel onward and ferment. The Centre for Food Safety notes plainly that in excess, sugar alcohols can cause laxative effects and gastrointestinal discomfort — gas, bloating, and worse — and that how likely this is depends on the quantity consumed.

Thresholds vary enormously between individuals and between polyols. Sorbitol and maltitol are among the more troublesome; erythritol is generally better tolerated. If you have ever eaten a packet of sugar-free sweets and regretted it two hours later, that's the mechanism. It is not a sign anything is wrong with the product.

Are the intense sweeteners safe? Yes — but that's not the whole question

On safety, the SFA's position is clear: like all food additives, non-nutritive sweeteners must be assessed before sale in Singapore, must comply with maximum levels in the Food Regulations, and must be clearly labelled. SFA takes reference from the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives and runs a sampling and testing programme to check compliance. The one firm exception is aspartame, which people with phenylketonuria (PKU) must avoid.

The more interesting question is whether they help. In 2023 the World Health Organization released a guideline advising against using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control, after a systematic review found no long-term benefit for body fat in adults or children, and signals of possible undesirable effects with long-term use. WHO classed the recommendation as conditional — meaning the underlying evidence is not strong — and it does not apply to people with pre-existing diabetes.

It's worth being honest about the counter-evidence too. A 2023 Nature Medicine study linked higher circulating erythritol levels to cardiovascular events and showed enhanced platelet reactivity in mechanistic work — but the European Food Safety Authority's own 2023 evaluation, as summarised by the Centre for Food Safety, concluded the available studies had not demonstrated a causal relationship between dietary erythritol and cardiovascular disease. Association is not proof, and this one is still being argued out.

What this means at the shelf in Singapore

HPB's HealthHub guidance on cutting salt and sugar puts the recommended ceiling at about 10 teaspoons (50g) of sugar a day for most adults, with WHO suggesting 5 teaspoons (25g) for additional benefit. HealthHub's own take on sweeteners is measured: short-term, small amounts can help someone step down their free-sugar intake, but long-term reliance is "not ideal" and sustained improvements to overall diet quality work better.

Three practical habits:

  • Read past the front. "Sugar-free" tells you about sugar, not about calories, fat or sodium. Check the energy line anyway.
  • Look for -itol endings high in the ingredients list. Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight, so a polyol near the top means a substantial dose per serving.
  • Consider whether the snack needs sweetening at all. A savoury snack sidesteps the entire question.

None of this makes sweeteners villains. It makes them a tool with specific trade-offs — modest calorie savings, real dental and blood-sugar advantages, an unglamorous gut cost at higher doses, and no demonstrated long-term help with weight.

A savoury way out of the sugar-free trade-off

If you'd rather not weigh up polyol thresholds during your 3pm break, the simplest move is a snack that was never built around sweetness. HexaCrunch's Try-All 3-Pack is baked brown-rice crackers with cricket protein — savoury, wholegrain-based, and with no sugar alcohols or intense sweeteners doing the heavy lifting. Flip our packet over and the ingredients list is short enough to read in one breath, which is really the standard every snack should be held to.

Sources

This article is general information, not medical or dietary advice. If you are managing diabetes or a gut condition, speak to your doctor or a dietitian about what suits you.

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