A fascinating story in New Yorker magazine on redesigning sugar. There's currently two competing approaches to reducing the harmful effects of sugar while keeping the taste benefits as well as the important role sugar plays in baking—artificial sweeteners fail to deliver the crumbling important in certain types of pastries.

One approach is mixing sugar with indigestible, but effectively harmless additives like silica, or changing the make-up of the sugar molecules just enough change how it's metabolised:

"Each silica grain is less than a fiftieth the diameter of human hair—invisible to the eye and undetectable on the tongue. DouxMatok’s production process embeds them throughout each sugar crystal, like blueberries in a muffin. /... / The atoms in a sucrose molecule are usually stacked in a well-ordered lattice, but when this structure becomes what scientists call “amorphous,” its atoms frozen in random chaos, it dissolves on the tongue much more quickly. Incredo’s exponentially more soluble structure rapidly saturates your taste buds, delivering an intense hit of sweetness."

The other is finding a different enough kind of sugar that the human body doesn't quite know how to approach:

"Allulose caramelizes, it fluffs, it stabilizes, and it delivers both mouthfeel and crumb structure in baked goods. “It behaves like a sugar because it is one,” Carr said. Yet, despite the fact that this rare sugar behaves almost exactly like sucrose in the kitchen, it remains sufficiently alien to pass through the human intestine without being digested or fermented."

There might just be another way by simply gradually reducing the amount of it, much like it's been gradually increased for tens of years:

Hampton mentioned that, before he came to Tate & Lyle, he worked at PepsiCo, where he managed to cut salt levels in British potato chips by half during a five-year period, without anyone noticing. “Can you do it with sugar as well? That’d be interesting,” he said.