Cooking Huel - sucralose decomposition at high temperatures

Doesn’t concern me, because I only eat U/U and don’t cook with Huel anyway, but it is something I came across:

You can probably also find more info over at pubmed Heating of food containing sucralose might result in the generation of potentially toxic chlorinated compounds - PubMed or this article in Nature Thermal degradation of sucralose: a combination of analytical methods to determine stability and chlorinated byproducts | Scientific Reports

Notably, this research came out after Huel was released, so the Huel team might not have been aware of this.

Has Huel performed any testing on this? Would be great if Huel could comment on that in their article on safety of sucralose Is sucralose safe to eat? – Huel where it specifically says that “Sucralose is very stable: it’s not affected by heat” and “sucralose is a great choice both for baking”.

Edit: Unlike all the research for biological safety of sucralose, which frankly is impossible to replicate and is still done in a very poor fashion anyway, this thing could be tested by Huel themselves. Heat up Huel to typical baking temperatures, and try to detect the decomposition products of sucralose.

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It seems odd that such a document would be published with so much speculative ‘data’ – in their own words, the probability and severity of it causing any health issues cannot be determined as ‘the data currently available are not sufficient to permit a definitive assessment of the potential health risks’ and that the reliability of the data they used is Low.

TBH I haven’t heard much about this at all and as these pubs are more than a couple of years old I would have thought/hoped something more definitive would have been know if there were a risk.

Hi @rikefrejut - thanks for this. This is something we’ll look at. We’ll look into it and get back to you.

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Hey @rikefrejut

Thanks for picking out the quotes in our sucralose article. We are going to get the wording changed to align with the level of certainty in published scientific papers.

We are aware of this research and it’s important to point out that the research is still inconclusive overall. Kind of like the research around gut health.

If people don’t want to take the risk, then as you said, UU could be used in cooking.

I know on the face of it this sounds simple, however it’s not. You need expensive equipment to detect the quite niche decomposition products and trained scientists. This isn’t a typical test that our third party labs offer. The current research looking at other products is sufficient to draw conclusions for now and we will keep an eye on any new studies.

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Thank you for looking into this.

I know nutrition research is sadly still in its infancy, unable to give any definitive statements on anything really (aside from “If you don’t eat anything at all, you’ll eventually definitely die”, but then there are breatharians who disagree with that too…) but at least it could start putting a little bit extra pressure on 3rd party labs to start offering more and more advanced tests.

In any case, thank you for providing U/U, it really sets you apart from many of your competitors that don’t have such a product.

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Totally agree. The more we can test, the more confident we can be so we’ll look to see if these sorts of tests become more readily available.

No problem! I love it because I can mix it with other flavours to tone down the sweetness.

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