Chicago ? Midway through the afternoon, when the belly yearns for snacks, three NutraSweet executives are going wild: cola, orange drink, citrus punch, chocolate milk, more cola, pound cake and crispy squares of coconut pie – all test kitchen concoctions made with artificial sweeteners.

They consume two servings of everything. In quick succession.

They were exuberant about one of the pound cakes – moist, crumbly and nicely browned.

“The person who cooked these said she never had such browning before,” says Craig R. Petray, chief executive of NutraSweet Co.

In the bounty of goodies before them lies a vision of the future of sweetness – a future, these executives hope, just as sweet and delectable as real sugar.

But, as researchers have discovered, the quest to find a perfect, consequence-free artificial sweetener is deceptively difficult, littered with cloying, metallic and just plain odd-tasting chemicals.

Today, the research is receiving fresh attention – fueled by an expanding national waistline. Nutritionists believe that Americans’ breathtaking intake of sugars in soft drinks and processed foods is partly to blame.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the average American eats about 100 pounds of added sugars a year, up 30 percent since the 1980s.

Researcher Poonit Kamdar prepares cells bearing sweet-taste receptors at Senomyx Inc. in San Diego. The biotech company is testing thousands of chemicals to see whether they enhance the receptor's efficiency. If such chemicals are found, they could make it possible to reduce sugar in foods without artificial additives.

Consumers are taking note, trying in small ways to clean up their act. Diet soft drinks sales are growing at 6 percent a year, while those of regular soft drinks are declining by as much as 2 percent.

After years of loading snacks with sugar, food manufacturers are developing more reduced-sugar brands so that consumers can have their cake and eat it.

To tackle the problem, some are cutting down just slightly on sugar in their products, or artfully combining high-intensity artificial sweeteners to find just the right combinations to mimic real sugar.

Search is on

Other companies are turning to the latest research in genetics and chemistry. Now there are humming labs, seeking out “enhancer” chemicals that accentuate the effects of real sugars, thus allowing less to be used.

Shaving away sugar is no easy business.

Sugar does much more than merely sweeten. It provides crumbliness to a cake’s interior, crispness to its outside and a richer taste to a soft drink.

Despite decades of research, artificial sweeteners – a $1 billion-a-year market in the United States – still taste noticeably unnatural.

“You could probably line up 30 different sweeteners and I could tell you what each one was, no problem,” says Susan Schiffman, a sweetness researcher at Duke University Medical Center.

First sweeteners

The first artificial sweetener was found in 1879 by accident.

Two chemists at Johns Hopkins University, Constantine Fahlberg and Ira Remsen, were trying to make new chemical dyes from coal tar derivatives when a vessel boiled over in the lab one day. Fahlberg failed to properly wash his hands before a meal and noted how sweet his fingers tasted.

He traced the sweetness back to a two-ringed chemical called benzoic acid sulfanilamide. Fully 300 times sweeter than sugar, it is indigestible by the body, and thus calorie-free. He later dubbed the chemical saccharin, from saccharum, the Latin word for sugar.

The pattern of serendipity – Aspartame was discovered in 1965 by chemist Jim Schlatter, who licked his finger while testing a new anti-ulcer drug for the pharmaceutical company G. D. Searle & Co. – has continued up until today.

Scientists now know of scores of sweet chemicals: monellin, stevioside, thaumatin, lugduname, glycyrrhizin, maltitol and the tasty-but-toxic dulcin, which was used as a sweetener during World War I (and poisoned several children.)

Only a handful have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as sweeteners: saccharin (most commonly known by the ubiquitous pink Sweet’N Low packets); acesulfame K (a less-known saccharin-like chemical); aspartame (in Diet Coke and Pepsi and the little blue packets of Equal); sucralose (in yellow Splenda packets); and neotame, the most recently-discovered sweetener, more than 7,000 times sweeter than sugar.

The problems in removing sugar from products have sparked a revolution in taste science.

Senomyx leads way

Could there be a way to make a little bit of sugar pack a big dollop of sweetness?

It’s an approach that has been embraced by Senomyx Inc., of San Diego, whose research has been supported by food heavyweights Campbell Soup Co., the Coca-Cola Co. and Nestle.

Three years ago, Senomyx identified the receptor in the taste buds responsible for sweet taste – the one to which sugar and artificial sweeteners bind to create the sweetness in cake, soda and candy.

Senomyx has trawled through 200,000 chemicals and found several hundred sweetness-enhancer candidates. The company now is tinkering with two, dubbed S299 and S679.

Sweet success?

NutraSweet’s Sweet Spot test kitchen in Chicago is trying to combine artificial sweeteners so that one makes up for the deficiencies of the other in mimicking the precise nature of sugar.

Ihab E. Bishay, NutraSweet’s vice president for research and development, sipped a small plastic beaker of a cola sample in the test kitchen, as he does several times a week.

“Number 267 finished cleaner, with a good cola flavor at the end,” says.

The search continues.