Investigating Natural Sweetners vis-à-vis their Nutritional, Anti-nutritional and Bioactive Characteristics

Natural sweeteners are renowned for their delicious taste with less amount of calories and also replace artificial sweeteners from human diet. The current study was planned to assess the nutritional quality of sweeteners such as jaggery, honey and corn syrup. These sweeteners were significantly different in terms of energy content since it was higher in jaggery followed by honey and corn syrup, respectively. Corn syrup was found rich in total sugars, reducing sugars and starch, whereas jaggery contained higher amount of non-reducing sugars. Further, jaggery had significantly (p≤0.05) higher amount of minerals such as calcium, phosphorus, iron, zinc and potassium when compared to honey. Moreover, significantly (p≤0.05) higher antioxidant activity was recorded in jaggery than that of honey and corn syrup. These sweeteners can be used in developing diverse range of value added food products viz. traditional sweet dishes, convenience products, bakery products, dairy products, beverages and so on. Hence, it was concluded that nutritional and antioxidant quality of jaggery was better than honey and corn syrup.