Healing with Food Article

Sugar and Quality Sweeteners

Accompanying recipe: Shortbread Cookies

If you’re one of the many people who suffer from sugar cravings (as did I for decades), you can free yourself.  I have done so as have many of my students. Here’s what we’ve discovered.

When a meal satisfies, you don’t nibble on carbohydrates between meals. When, however, you skip a meal, or you eat sweets that are empty of other nutrients, then you’ll feel empty and reach for something to fill the hole. It’s predictable.

So your first step in freeing yourself from the sugar teeter-totter (and to prevent diabetes) is to, as your mother admonished, eat three good meals a day.

This takes some doing as packaged foods and restaurant meals fall short. Because their denatured ingredients lack oomph they can’t deeply satisfy. Furthermore, most are laced with cheap sugars or—even worse—with faux sweeteners that actually goad your cravings for more sweets.

Let’s examine the quality sweeteners so that, as part of a good diet, you can enjoy a great cookie…and stop there.  In order to skillfully navigate thru marketing hype to discern the good sweeteners, I’ll also mention the ones to avoid.

But first, it’s useful to reflect that no sweetener is a whole food; each has had something removed to concentrate its sugars. Nectar is refined by bees into honey, maple sap is concentrated into maple syrup, and cane’s fiber and nutrients are removed to make table sugar.

Your opportunity is to avoid the empty sweeteners. But delight in the minimally refined sweeteners that retain their trace minerals and rich flavor.

Cane Sugar

Worldwide, the most common sweetener is table sugar (sucrose), which is typically extracted from sugar cane. The most wholesome cane products have their trace nutrients intact. Two such domestically available cane sugars, Rapadura and Sucanat, are 90% crystalline sucrose enveloped in 10% mineral-rich cooked cane juice. Of the two, I find Rapadura more flavorful and satisfyingly sweet.

Rapadura and Sucanat are available in quality food stores and on line. (In import stores they’re available as jaggery, gur, piloncillo or panela.) Use them, cup for cup as you would sugar in any recipe. Whole sugars imbue a buff to tan color and wonderful flavor to your finished dish.

In comparison, white sugar is 99.85% sucrose and tastes harsh, cloyingly sweet and one-dimensional. Chemically pure sucrose, like any drug, plays havoc in your system.  Also, avoid the numerous highly refined cane products that attempt to convey a healthful image but are as drained of nutrients as is white sugar. (An exception is blackstrap molasses, the mineral-rich by-product of sugar cane production.)

Cane Sweeteners Masquerading as “Healthful”
    
Typically, the following cane products are refined to pure sucrose and then “painted” with a little molasses to lightly color and flavor the sugar. They are NOT recommended because they lack trace nutrients. Unfortunately “natural,” “whole” and “unrefined” are open terms without legal protection.

Brown Sugar
Demrerara
Evaporated Cane Juice
Florida Crystals
Muscovado
Naturally Milled Organic Cane Juice
Organic Plantation Milled Sugar
Organic Whole Cane Sugar
Raw sugar
Sugar-in-the-Raw
Turbinado
Unrefined Cane Juice
Whole Cane
Yellow-D

Honey

Take away the water from honey and it’s about as sugary as white sugar. Honey does, however, retain nearly all of the flower nectars’ original nutrients. In comparison to table sugar, it is “minimally” refined.

Favor local, unpasteurized, wild flower honey. Buying locally supports the local economy and, if you have pollen allergies, may decrease your allergic response to pollen. Unlike pasteurized honey, raw honey is not mucus forming and it retains its medicinal properties (it helps ease constipation and fluid retention, and according to Oriental medicine, tones the pancreas).

Because of wild flowers’ genetic diversity, honey gathered from wild blossoms is superior in flavor and essence to cultivated crops, like clover or orange. I always favor a local, dark colored--and therefore more mineral dense--wild flower honey.

Other Sweeteners

As with sugar, your guideline for judging quality sugar alternatives is to favor those which are minimally refined and higher in trace nutrients. Because the following are higher in fructose and/or maltose, some people regard them as more healthful than white sugar.

With all purchases, read labels carefully and bypass any product that contains cheap additives like corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose or artificial sweeteners.

Agave Syrup  The sap of a cactus-like desert plant, agave, is a remarably abundant source of fructose (70%). This ranks it low on the glycemic index and makes it a healthy sweetener for non-insulin dependent diabetics. Thanks to agave syrup’s pleasant sweetness, versatility and moderate price, it is quickly becoming a popular food and beverage sweetener.

Maple & Birch Syrup  Two excellent and delicious sweeteners are concentrated sap from maple and birch trees. The sap is collected and its water is reduced (historically by evaporation, today by reverse osmosis). While maple syrup comes from northeastern United States, birch syrup is produced in Scandinavia and Alaska. Both are energy intensive and therefore pricey—it takes 40 gallons of maple sap, or 80 gallons of birch sap, to make one gallon of pure syrup.

Grain Sweeteners  Any grain can be malted into sweet, maltose-rich syrup. Enzymes digest the grains’ complex carbohydrates into a more simple sugar.  Barley malt and rice or sorghum syrups are the most common.

(Corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup are pure hydrolyzed products devoid of trace nutrients and are not recommended. They’re cited by some nutritionists as leading causes of obesity.)

Artificial Sweeteners—Not Recommended
The non-caloric sweeteners are a chemical rather than a food—please avoid them. Note, when doing on-line research about their toxicity, you’ll find conflicting data. The manufacturers’ web pages claim their safety; numerous alternative publications report otherwise.

Of the artificial sweeteners, xylitol has been highly marketed as a “healthy” sweetener. Xylitol is dangerous—even life-threatening—for pets according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Xylitol, a pure crystalline chemical, or hydrogenated polyol, is typically a byproduct of the plywood industry but it may also synthesized from cornstalks. Yes, data correlates xylitol with the reduction of dental caries, however there are more wholesome ways of preventing tooth decay.

Neither do I recommend the other chemical sweeteners Acesulfame-K (Sunette, Sweet & Safe, Sweet One), Aspartame (Equal, Canderel and NutraSweet), cyclamates, saccharine or sucralose (Splenda).

Here's my favorite shortbread cookie recipe that I make with natural sugar and rice flour.

May you be well nourished,

Rebecca Wood