Friday Q&A: Are Honey & Stevia the Best Sugar Alternatives?

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Fructose is different than glucose in that while glucose will raise blood sugar, fructose doesn't. So it sounds like it's awesome, but it's not. Because instead of raising, when it doesn't raise blood sugar, it also doesn't trigger any satiety signals.

So.

So you ate sugar and you're still hungry.

Here's JJ Virgin triple board certified nutrition and fitness expert and four time New York Times bestselling author. It's time to reignite wellness.

All right, welcome to Friday Q and A. Today we are answering questions on sugar. All right, so I've got two different questions. I'm going to answer them both and I'm going to talk about sugar in general. The one first came from Autumn. Shakirn is organic stevia safe. And the next One came from three under 30. Three under 30 by Maria is natural honey. Okay, okay, so first of all, let's talk sugar in general. Now, I wrote the sugar impact diet because I realized we were looking at sugar all wrong. It's not about eating no sugar. Remember, all carbohydrates except for fiber turn to sugar. It's just whether you're mainlining them or making them slowly from the food you eat. Guess what, you want choice too. But what we do want to make sure of is that if we are using things to sweeten up our food, that we're using things that help us, not hurt us. So what hurts us? Well, I know that it seems like little bees buzzing around with honey should be so great and healthy, but the challenge is it's still sugar. Now, there are some really beneficial things in honey. And my buddies over at Beekeepers naturals have pulled those things out so that you can use them. But honey itself is sugar. And remember what happens when you get sugar in your body. It raises blood sugar, raises insulin, tells your body store fat, not burn it. It's stressful, it's inflammatory. It causes cravings. It's been linked to all the major diseases, and you ultimately break all your sugars down to one of two forms, glucose or fructose. Now, honey is both glucose and fructose. And fructose is different than glucose in that while glucose will raise blood sugar, fructose doesn't. So it sounds like it's awesome, but it's not. Because instead of raising, when it doesn't raise blood sugar, it also doesn't trigger any satiety signals. So you ate sugar and you're still hungry. It goes straight to the liver. It's the only organ that can metabolize it, where it tells your body to make fat. And it can also raise your blood sugar and make you more insulin resistant. So you don't need sugar. You don't need sugar. You can make it slowly from foods that are whole foods with lots of fiber. So my favorite places to make sugar from would be things like squash, non starchy vegetables, or to get a little bit in something like a berry, right, where you're gonna have a slow release because of the fiber. Now, if you're looking for something to sweeten foods up, which is why I'm getting asked about the honey or the stevia, et cetera, what you want to avoid if you're using honey. Here's the deal. You might want to use honey, local, organic, raw. If you have some kind of allergy, it can be a kind of homeopathic at about a half a teaspoon. That's not what people are doing. They're squeezing the bear into their coffee. They're squeezing in a boatload, thinking they're healthy because it's honey. That's not the case. All right, so you are not a big bear. You don't need to eat the honey. Now what you do want to do, though, if you're looking to sweeten things up, avoid agave. That's the worst of the worst. I don't know. You know, it's because it doesn't raise blood sugar. They think it's fine. But it's all fructose. Avoid apple juice concentrate, crystalline fructose, any of that kind of stuff. These are all sugars. What you want to choose instead are some of the sweeteners that are not artificial. They're natural from plants that don't impact blood sugar and actually may even have some health benefits. Here they are. They are allulose monk fruit stevia, and then the sugar alcohols, erythritol and xylitol. If your gut can handle xylitol, mine cannot. So see how it is. I like to actually blend these things and use a little bit of cinnamon, which balances blood sugar or vanilla which is naturally sweet too and boosts serotonin to help. So what I like about allulose is it actually the study showing coming out about this very interesting sweetener that the body can't really absorb so you get the sweet without the calories, is that it can help with fatty liver, may help balance blood sugar, may ultimately help help with weight loss. So but here's a rule with all of these. If you're using monk fruit, allulose, erythritol, stevia, is you do not want to keep your sweet tooth fired up. So if you're using these things, use them to taper down instead of just to go to keep your sweet tooth fired up. So here's what I like to do. I like to teach you how to eat from the trifecta of fat, fiber and prote to keep your blood sugar balanced and add before I take away with adding more vegetables, adding water, adding green tea, adding clean protein, adding healthy fats, adding more fiber. And then, and we walk through this in the sugar impact diet, we taper you down off of the your sugar impact, going from high to medium to low. We start to incorporate more savory and spicy and sour because sour can take your sweet tooth away. Yay. And we start to really, we use those monk fruit allulose, stevia, erythritol as transitions. But ideally, we're really getting you to appreciate the natural sweetness of things. One thing, one caveat there is we know with artificial sweeteners, which are the worst of the worst, because they can actually change your gut microbiome, so you become more glucose intolerant, which could make you insulin resistant, which could make you pre diabetic. Lots of problems with artificial sweeteners besides that, potentially neurotoxic, etc. But the one thing we do know that they also do is trigger caloric disruption, meaning that you can no longer calibrate the degree of sweetness with the amount of calories. And so you tend to overeat. And I worry with stevia and monk fruit and allulose and xylitol that you could get into that same rut. So don't go be a piggy with them is the takeaway. All right. Okay. That's the Friday Q and A on sugar. And again, thank you, Autumn, and thank you 3 under 30 by Maria for asking those questions. If you'd like to ask a question, you can go to my Instagram, JJ Virgin Facebook, JJ Virgin Official, or jump on over to iTunes subscribetojay.com you can leave a review while you're there, hint, hint, and subscribe so you never miss the next episode and let me know what question you like me to answer. All right, thanks. See ya.

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