We met with Professor LUK, a clinician in endocrinology and diabetes at CUHK to stress-test our assumptions about a protein sweetener’s real clinical value and everyday use. Her first point was disarmingly practical. Low-calorie sweeteners are already plentiful and, because dosing is tiny, price rarely decides adoption. What matters is whether a new sweetener is genuinely substitutable in ordinary routines for example being stirred into coffee or tea, folded into simple home cooking and whether people actually like the taste. This prompted us to tighten our goals to eventually go beyond bench stability. Our design must survive near-boiling water and common beverage matrices, and we will need controlled sensory comparisons against sucrose and a mainstream sweetener, not just buffer-based tasting.
Safety and metabolism came next. Calling our sweetener a protein is not a safety argument. Clinicians want to know how it is digested and cleared, and whether anything in that path raises red flags. The recommendation was a staged plan where we begin with in-silico digestibility and allergenicity screening, take early advice from a nutritionist so our endpoints match clinical guidance, and escalate to mammalian studies only if those first steps suggest a risk that needs resolving. We also discussed behaviour. In clinics, people often compensate after substitutions in their diet. They save calories in drinks and spend them elsewhere therefore so a sweetener is unlikely to prevent obesity or diabetes on its own. In a population where roughly 10–11% live with diabetes, the sensible term to be used is glycaemic neutrality. At realistic use levels, our sweetener should not raise insulin and we should also avoid making claims in regards to renal safety. She also suggested we interview a nutritionist as she believed their viewpoints would be distinctly different and just as insightful in regards to the role of our sweetener in a person’s diet and health.