Sugar - Part 2
Healthy Sugars & The Not-So-Great
Yes, it’s absolutely possible to have sweet foods in your life and keep your body happy and healthy.
The Best - Naturally Sweet Foods
Naturally sweet whole foods are the gentlest on your body. If you’re a big-time sweet craver (like me), be sure to enjoy these often to quench your sugar cravings.
Fruit –
Our body loves fruit when it’s in its whole form. The fibre slows down the release of the naturally occurring fructose and it’s full of vitamins and antioxidants.
Dried fruit (raisins, dates, etc) –
Keep in mind that it’s easy to eat a much bigger serving of dried fruit versus fresh fruit. 2 or 3 dates are wonderful bursts of sweetness…but a bag of dates might overwhelm your system
Bananas, dates, apple sauce, and sweet potatoes work beautifully as sweeteners in many recipes.
Healthy Sugars
These sugars are full of nutrients but they’re lacking the fibre needed to slow down the absorption of the sugar into your bloodstream, so be sure to use them with whole grains or other high fibre food. Like using maple syrup in an oatmeal cookie or black bean brownies (they’re so good they need to be mentioned twice :)
Honey –
Raw, local honey is a very healthy and healing food. Unprocessed and low in fructose, it won’t cause the liver issues agave and other fructose sugars can. It also has anti-viral properties and is works wonderfully on a stubborn cough.
Maple Syrup –
This whole sugar is wonderful on oatmeal and other breakfast whole grains and contains all of the trace minerals needed to be properly digested.
Unrefined Cane Sugar (Sucanut) –
This is a great substitute in any recipe that calls for white or brown sugar. Same flavour, but unrefined!
Coconut Sugar –
New on the market and quite popular, this sugar is easy to use in all recipes and won’t cause blood sugar fluctuations.
Molasses –
Molasses is what’s removed when refined sugar is refined. This means it’s full of nutrients and much lower in sugar vs white and even brown sugar. It’s full of minerals and B vitamins. Blackstrap molasses is extra nutrient-dense but has a strong flavour.
Probably a-okay…but more research is needed
These are 0 or low-cal sweeteners that as of today, seem pretty darn alright. But, more research is needed.
Monk Fruit –
This is a type of fruit from Southeast Asia. It has a pleasantly sweet taste without any calories. I find it much more pleasant than stevia or any other 0 cal sweetener.
Stevia –
Stevia is a natural low-calorie sweetener. Made from the stevia leaf (a plant you can grow in your backyard), it’s as natural as natural can be. Most have a love or hate relationship to the taste of stevia due to its slight licorice flavour. For some it tastes bitter, to others it’s a fave sweetener for tea or coffee.
Stevia vs Truvia - Truvia is manufactured by the food giant Cargill, and is marketed as a “stevia-based low-calorie sweetener”. Oddly, its first ingredient isn’t stevia but Erythritol, which is derived from GMO corn. Its second ingredient is Rebiana, which is a highly refined form of stevia…and only makes up a very small portion of this product. Truvia is a very different sweetener than natural whole leaf stevia.
The Middle Ground & The Not-So-Great
These are sweeteners that are a-okay in a pinch or if you find them in a food…but eat them in moderation.
Sugar Alcohols –
Anything that ends with “-itol” is a sugar alcohol. They can be derived from refined GMO corn (sorbitol & erythritol), wood (xylitol), and seaweed (mannitol). They’re naturally found in food like fruit, but most commercial sugar alcohols come from things we would normally throw away.
The biggest issue with sugar alcohols is they can cause tremendous bloating. Especially if you’re dealing with a gut bacteria imbalance like SIBO.
My concern with sugar alcohols is that they *may* affect the body in a similar way to artificial sweeteners. We’ve found out in the last decade or so that artificial sweeteners trick the body into thinking sugar is coming, but none does. This can cause bingeing and weight gain. I’ve yet to find any research that looked at sugar alcohols to see if they have the same effect. So…until that time, I’m on the fence with them.
Grocery store “honey” (like Billy Bee honey) –
I need to add “” to this type of “honey” because, by definition, it’s not really honey anymore. It’s just sugar water. Real, unprocessed honey is full of B vitamins and can be used as medicine for things like coughs and stubborn wounds. But Billy Bee honey has had all of the good stuff refined out of it. It’s okay in a pinch, but it’s a good one to switch out for unprocessed local honey sooner than later.
(Fun fact re: grocery store honey – there’s also a possible “honey laundering scheme” happening where honey from China is shipped and processed in a different country to hide its origins. The rumor mill is high on that one!)
Cane Sugar –
One of the ways food processors health-wash a food is by listing “cane sugar” instead of sugar. In the past, most refined sugars came from sugar cane, but today most comes from GMO sugar beet, so cane sugar is a better option. But, there’s no way of knowing how refined this sugar is, so use it in moderation.
Brown Sugar –
Brown sugar seems like a healthier alternative to white sugar, and it kinda is…but brown sugar has been refined as well. It’s white sugar with some of the molasses added back in. It’s 95% sucrose and 5% molasses (vs white sugar that’s 99.9% sucrose). The added molasses will prevent some nutritional deficiencies but it can trigger pain and inflammation in the same way as white sugar. Maple syrup, coconut sugar, and unrefined can sugar are better alternatives.
Now that you know about the great and pretty good sugars…I bet you wanna know what the ugly ones are. Hop over to Part 3 :)
Got any questions or comments? Comment below, jump to our private Facebook Group, or the Ask Lisa page :).