omg y’all know how sugar alcohols cause that minty/cooling feeling in your mouth when you eat them?

apparently they are literally cooling your mouth down. when sugar alcohols are in crystal form and they dissolve in a liquid, the process is endothermic so it literally sucks the heat from your mouth a little bit

also: sugar alcohols are a little less sweet than regular sugar, but they still have a drastically higher sweetness-to-calorie ratio than sugar, and that’s because your intestines have a much harder time absorbing them into your bloodstream than regular sugar

@desea omg I had never heard the term birch sugar before! apparently xylitol is called birch sugar because it was found in birch bark, which is where it gets the name

although these days it looks like xylitol is mostly made from xylose which can be extracted from a ton of different plant parts of various plants https://www.celignis.com/bioprocess-xylitol.php