Not so healthy "healthy" sweeteners

What are your alternatives if you want to avoid sugar? Simple answer: don't eat sugar.

But of course, you and I both know that's not going to work...for long, anyway. If you're like me, you probably grew up eating cake and pie and cookies, not to mention candy bars, soda pop, and Kool-Aid. They were part of life. They were the reward for eating our vegetables! We see them as a psychological necessity. A pathway to happiness.

One of the most frequent statements I get when I talk "healthy eating" with people is, "I could never give up my sweets." Okay, what if you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the sweets were the cause of your disease? Would you give them up then? If society in general is any indication, the answer is probably "no." There is plenty of research being done trying to find answers to our national fat problem, and most of the fingers are pointing at sugar. Sugar consumption, in this country and much of the Western world, has increased nearly a hundred fold over the past hundred years. Even since the 1960s, when the low-fat diet agenda took hold, we continue to get fatter and fatter. Dietary fat is still very much misunderstood, but it's pretty much settled that sugar is bad for us.

People who are concerned about their health or their weight know, intuitively, that they should "cut back" on sugar. But it's very hard to do because sugar is addictive. It functions on the brain exactly like a narcotic.

Isn't it odd that the first thing most people do when, for whatever reason, they can't eat something is to look for a substitute. People with wheat allergies figure out how to make bread with almond flour or coconut flour or rice flour. It never ever really tastes like bread, but they eat it anyway. People who stop eating meat suddenly start eating pretend meat made out of soy beans. And an entire industry has arisen to provide diabetics with all of their favorite desserts -- sugar free.

Why do we need these foods? We don't, of course, but we think we do. And now I'm going to step on the toes of the foodies-- you know, the ones who are adamantly opposed to processed foods, white sugar, white flour, chemicals, and so on... people like me!

Those people will cringe in horror at the thought of putting a cup of white sugar in their favorite dessert recipe, but for some reason, they're okay with

• Agave (16g sugar per Tbsp)
• Honey (16g sugar per Tbsp)
• Concentrated fruit sweetener (10g sugar per Tbsp)
• Brown rice syrup (11g sugar per Tbsp)
• Coconut nectar (13g sugar per Tbsp)
• Maple syrup (12g sugar per Tbsp)
• Raw sugar (12g sugar per Tbsp)
• Sucanat (12g sugar per Tbsp)
• Date sugar (9g sugar per Tbsp)
• Molasses (10g sugar per Tbsp)

...and the list goes on.

But as the poet said, "a sugar molecule, by any other name, is still a sugar molecule"...or something like that. Sugar, in any form, behaves badly in our body and really isn't good for us.

I was grabbing a supposedly natural chicken salad at my local Chipotle's not too long ago and I noticed a big sign promoting their margaritas, now sweetened with agave. Lovely, I thought. Instead of sugar going straight to fat in my body, it's going to my liver first...and then to fat. Great plan! My liver is already trying to detoxify my body from the alcohol (in the margarita), and now it also has to process all that fructose, too.

Don't be fooled into thinking that fructose is healthy because it comes from fruit. Too much fruit sugar is really worse than too much cane sugar. This is also true of high fructose corn syrup or any high fructose sweetener-- like agave. Fructose is metabolized in the liver. When we eat more than our liver can process, we're in trouble. We hear a lot about the "Glycemic Index" these days because it relates to how fast sugar is metabolized-- a major concern for those with diabetes. Foods with a low GI induce a slower, milder insulin response. Since fructose does not go straight into the blood, but must first bypass through the liver, it has a lower GI and is typically approved for diabetics. But this is deceptive thinking and doesn't take into account the toxic load put on the liver, particularly when we eat large amounts of it.

It would be incomplete of me to wind up this post without mentioning the newest favorite zero-calorie "natural" sweetener, stevia. Who hasn't heard about this gem?!  Call me a skeptic, but I've never really trusted the claims of this new product. Mark and I tried it and neither of us really liked the taste. But aside from taste, my biggest beef with stevia is the same one I have for every other processed food -- it's processed.

Of course, not all processing is bad. We process food when we prepare meals in our kitchens. Some foods, like spinach and broccoli, are better digested if they've been lightly cooked, as the heating process helps to release nutrients. But when manufacturers process food, it always involves one of the following:

• Cooking the life out of it (literally destroying most or all of the nutrients)
• Extruding (sending through a high-pressure press, which destroys nutrients)
• Removing offending colors or flavors using chemicals like bleach or hexane gas
• Removing naturally occurring fats and replacing them with sugars and/or chemicals
• Removing naturally occurring sugars and replacing them with chemicals
• Adding back artificial colors or flavors to make the product palatable (chemicals)
• Adding back artificial nutrients (synthetic vitamins, which are only fractions of whole, natural vitamins)

It's no different with Stevia. Food Babe has a great post on this topic, Food Babe Investigates Stevia: Good or Bad?, and I would encourage you to check it out.  If they have to go to THAT much trouble to create a sweetener out of a leaf, it really is a stretch to call it "natural." Yes, the stevia leaf is natural.  So is corn. But I would no more throw a stevia leaf in my tea to sweeten it than I would throw in a teaspoon of corn. The most unprocessed sweetener on the planet is honey...straight from the beehive into the teacup! Honey is natural - stevia is not.

The truth is, when we put desserts and sweets of every kind in their rightful place--as an occasional treat, eaten in tiny portions-- we won't have to worry about what kind of "sugar" is in them.

Cutting back on sweets is the best gift you can give your body. And learning to give up what's unhealthy without looking for a magic substitute is a pretty nice gift, too.


Image credit: cbsnews.com