Paranoid mistrust, cancer fears, and fart-driven explosive diarrhea had already winnowed my list of non-sucrose sweeteners down to just erythritol, pure stevia powder, and very small amounts of xylitol.
I'll have to look into lactulose and palatinose.... And it looks like lactulose is out for the diarrhea reason, and isomaltulose--Palatinose is a trademarked name for it--looks practically identical to slow-motion sucrose, including caloric content. It has a lower glycemic index, but is half as sweet as sucrose, so you may end up consuming more calories for the same amount of sweetness.
Erythritol is not good for gut bacteria. It is 90% absorbed before reaching the colon, and excreted mostly intact in urine and feces, and the early absorption is why it doesn't have the diarrheal effect common to most sugar alcohols. Sweeteners that are neither absorbed nor digested draw water out of the digestive tract as they pass. Those that can be fermented by colon bacteria also tend to produce gases, that help push the water out. Xylitol is not fermentable, so the diarrhea you might get won't be quite so bad.
I think I'll stick with a mix of erthyritol and stevia, with proportions titrated such that equal-volume measures of erythritol/stevia and sucrose crystals have roughly equivalent sweetness. The flavor profile isn't quite right, but it's good enough for me until something better comes along.
(edit) I'll also add that it seems to work best in foods where other flavors can dominate. While you can sort of taste it as not being real sugar in lemonade, in sugar-free fudge, all you can taste is the sweetness. But it also forms crystals during cooling, and I haven't quite worked that out yet. Gritty/crunchy fudge is not exactly ideal.
To avoid crystals, maximize the variety of sugars. For example, if you had 20 different molecules, they wouldn't pack into crystals very well. If you are being a perfectionist, I think you'd want to do this by molar proportion rather than mass or volume.
For those paying less attention, by "different" I don't mean white sugar and raw sugar. Those are the same molecule.
Inulin may "help with loose days" much more than you probably think. It may actually help to systematically decrease your appetite and insulin resistance, decrease ghrelin (the "hunger hormone") and increase leptin (the "fullness hormone") if you eat it every day. I can recommend Dr. Raphael Kellman's "The microbiome diet" book for more info, it is easy and exciting to read and has a fair amount references to scientific research in it, it may happen that you will never have to worry about calories again after you read it.
I'll have to look into lactulose and palatinose.... And it looks like lactulose is out for the diarrhea reason, and isomaltulose--Palatinose is a trademarked name for it--looks practically identical to slow-motion sucrose, including caloric content. It has a lower glycemic index, but is half as sweet as sucrose, so you may end up consuming more calories for the same amount of sweetness.
Erythritol is not good for gut bacteria. It is 90% absorbed before reaching the colon, and excreted mostly intact in urine and feces, and the early absorption is why it doesn't have the diarrheal effect common to most sugar alcohols. Sweeteners that are neither absorbed nor digested draw water out of the digestive tract as they pass. Those that can be fermented by colon bacteria also tend to produce gases, that help push the water out. Xylitol is not fermentable, so the diarrhea you might get won't be quite so bad.
I think I'll stick with a mix of erthyritol and stevia, with proportions titrated such that equal-volume measures of erythritol/stevia and sucrose crystals have roughly equivalent sweetness. The flavor profile isn't quite right, but it's good enough for me until something better comes along.
(edit) I'll also add that it seems to work best in foods where other flavors can dominate. While you can sort of taste it as not being real sugar in lemonade, in sugar-free fudge, all you can taste is the sweetness. But it also forms crystals during cooling, and I haven't quite worked that out yet. Gritty/crunchy fudge is not exactly ideal.