How the brands measure up.(sugar substitutes)(Product/service evaluation)

Most nonsugar sweeteners will taste fine in your tea or lemonade. But use some of them for baking a cake, and you could have a real flop.

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These are the findings of our tests of 13 lower-calorie and no-calorie sweeteners, which we added to drinks and used to bake cookies and cakes, following package directions. We found that no sweetener does it all and that no-calorie products didn't bake as well as lower-calorie sweeteners: In other words, you can't really have your cake and no sugar too.

By far the best "fooler" in the lemonade and baked goods was Estee Fructose, which is the type of sugar found in fruit and honey. When used as directed in recipes for batter cakes, it gave better results than the other sweeteners. But it provided almost as many calories in the recipe as the real thing, and it costs almost five times as much.

In lemonade, most did well, but differences were noticeable. For example, the packets of Equal left no artificial taste, while Splenda had an artificial-sweetener flavor and was a little bitter.

Questions linger about possible health effects of two of the oldest sweeteners, saccharin and aspartame (see Healthwise, on opposite page). The newest sweetener, the herbal product stevia, is labeled a dietary supplement, so it didn't require approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Among our findings:

Cost ranged widely. The price of the equivalent of 2 teaspoons of sugar ranged from 2 cents for Wal-Mart's Great Value Altern to 66 cents for Sweet Simplicity. Two teaspoons of sugar cost a penny.