It’s time to add the word “neotame” to your ingredient label watch list, especially if you vape.

It’s a relatively new artificial sweetener found in every disposable e-cigarette that researchers tested – and the ultra-sweet substance is increasingly being used in food and drink.

You probably have heard of aspartame. But neotame is its lesser-known sibling, with just one molecular difference. It showed up in laboratory tests of 11 top disposable e-cigarette brands when researchers from Duke and Yale Universities were trying to figure out what makes the vapes, like Elf and Geek Bars, so, so sweet. Neotame is between 7,000 and 13,000 times sweeter than table sugar and up to 65 times sweeter than aspartame.

The sweetened e-cig study results were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA. Neotame wasn’t found in JUUL or other cartridge-based devices, which have their own checkered ingredient history, including the 2019 finding that the sucralose used in them was linked to the production of toxic aerosols.

Even if you don’t vape, you may already be consuming neotame, since it’s found in baked goods, candy (Mentos, for example), and gum – plus salad dressing, fruit spreads, dairy desserts, and yogurt. It’s also used in some flavored sparkling waters and drinks like Tampico Mango Punch. Some researchers have soured on neotame because its use makes e-cigs appealing to young people, and because lab tests show it may harm our intestines when ingested.

Maybe you saw it on an ingredient label and passed over it sometime in the past two decades. It has zero calories, no nutritional value, and was FDA-approved as a food additive in 2002. It’s not listed on disposable e-cigarette packaging. Researchers track these sweeteners. Havovi Chichger, PhD, a professor at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, says that for more than four decades, we have been consuming “traditional” artificial sweeteners like acesulfame potassium (Ace-K), sucralose, saccharin, and aspartame. But newer substances like neotame “herald the next generation of sweet additives,” she said.

The substance was developed in the 1990s in a quest for a more stable sweetener for processed products, and its use has steadily grown, she said. It’s even used now in some lip cosmetics that have a sweet flavor and aroma. Neotame has also become the 21st-century spoonful of sugar Mary Poppins sang about: It’s used to make some pharmaceuticals more palatable. According to a website about neotame set up by Georgia-based maker NutraSweet Co., neotame has an “ability to mask the taste of supplements, vitamins, bitter food ingredients and active pharmaceuticals. Moreover, its high sweetness intensity allows formulation at very small quantities, leaving ample room for your pharmaceutical ingredients.”