What Are Some Acceptable Substitutes for Sugar?

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What are Some Acceptable Substitutes for Sugar? Help. This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Lisa Gregory Erdman from Instagram asks, what are some accessible substitutes for sugar?

Help me out here.

Well, Lisa, good news. There's a bunch. I'll be right back with the answer.

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So yes, there's good news. There's a lot of acceptable substitutes for sugar and there's some definite ones to avoid. But before I dive into the acceptable ones, I want to just give you a little food for thought. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Here's the deal. While there's some ones here that I'm going to list that actually can help you you because not only are they safer, diabetes, they don't raise blood sugar, they have added benefits. I want you also to think of this. I want you to retrain your taste buds. In fact, what I do in the sugar impact diet is I help you taper down from higher sugar impact foods to lower sugar impact foods and retrain your taste buds to appreciate the natural sweetness of fruit, of sweet potatoes, of cinnamon, of vanilla, and also to enjoy spinach, spicy and savory and zesty types of foods. So I just want to put that out there. That what I don't want you to do here is take these things, I'm telling you, and go crazy with them. I want you to use them as a transition tool, but to really get your sweet tooth under control and your taste buds to wake back up. All right, with that being said, first I'm going to talk about monk fruit, also known as lo hango or Buddha fruit. It's actually a small round fruit grown in Southeast Asia. And it's got natural sugars, mainly fructose and glucose. But that's not what's responsible for its sweetness. What gives it its sweetness are these things called, these compounds called mogrosides. And these mogrosides don't raise blood sugar or insulin. They're not absorbed in the upper GI tract. And so they don't give us contribute any calories to the diet. When they do get to the colon, they cleave off glucose molecules and use them as an energy source. But the rest of it's excreted from the GI tract and very little is absorbed into the bloodstream. It's 150 to 200 times sweeter than sugar. And so again, it can contribute sweetness without adding calories. And turns out, and this was a 2011 study, it's been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries to make hot drinks that relieve sore throats and reduce phlegm. It's there also monk fruit, supposed to be anti inflammatory and may help prevent cancer and keep blood sugar levels stable. All right, Next up, stevia. And can I just say for the record that stevia has gotten a bad rap, and I cannot figure it out, because if you look at all the research on stevia, stevia is fantastic. It's also known as the sweet herb. It's been found to help with Lyme disease, and also if you have diabetes, it may help keep your blood sugar levels in check. Here was a study 2010, 19 healthy lean participants, 12 obese participants that found that stevia significantly lowered insulin and glucose levels. And it also left study participants satisfied and full after eating, despite the lower calorie intake. And then in another 2009 study, stevia leaf powder was shown to potentially help manage cholesterol. These study participants consumed 20ml of stevia extract daily for a month. And in the study, stevia lowered total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides with no negative side effects, and also increased HDL cholesterol. So there is stevia. Here's the caveat with stevia, though. First of all, make sure both with stevia and monk fruit that you're not buying it in a combination where they added sugar in there. No, no, no. And second of all, the deal with stevia, and I'm gonna give you a little secret at the end. The deal with stevia is if you use too much of it, you can get a bit of a, like, bitter aftertaste, which is a bit of a bummer. You know, that's not why you're doing something sweet. And, oh, heck, I'll just tell you the secret now. So what I like to do with any of these sweeteners, and I'm giving you a couple more here, is I like to blend them, and I find that that's how you get the closest taste to natural sweeteners. Sugar is just to mix these ones up. All right, so we've done monk fruit, we've done stevia. Next up, I gotta give a shout out to vanilla. Vanilla can naturally boost serotonin. It's naturally sweet. So I love the. The herb vanilla. Is it an herb? It's really a. I guess it's not an herb. It's a bean. So I love the bean vanilla. And I also love cinnamon. And cinnamon's great because it helps be balance blood sugar. So both those have great. I love anything that gives you a little boost, gives you that sweet taste, but also does something good for you, too. Now, two other ones I want to talk about are sugar alcohols and sugar alcohols. That is the most deceiving term ever, because it's not a sugar and they're not alcohols. So what the heck are they? They're actually something called a polyol. It's a carbohydrate with a chemical structure that partially resembles sugar and partially resembles alcohol. But they don't contain ethanol like alcoholic beverages do. Now, they are only half absorbed, so half the calories count, but the other ones aren't absorbed. Because of that, sometimes they can get you a little. Can I just say it? They get you a little gassy. What I found is erythritol, not so much, doesn't tend to do that. But xylitol, which is used a lot. You'll see it in toothpaste and gums because it's really good for your teeth. It can reduce your risk of cavities, but it also can give you some wicked gas. Wow. Learned that the hard way. So I'm trying to save you from that, too. I'm sorry, that was just a little tmi, wasn't it? All right, so the new one on the block, which is really exciting, like super exciting, is allulose. You're going to hear a lot more about allulose. Used to be that the fda, when you put allulose on a label, made you count all the calories, which just wasn't right because you'll hear in a moment. But now that's changed, which is why I think you're going to start seeing a lot more allulose use every, everywhere, because it was very confusing when you got it on the label. It is also known as rare sugar because it was discovered in small quantities in nature. It has the same sweet taste and texture as table sugar, but it's not metabolized by the body, so it's nearly calorie free. It's similar to structure in a carbohydrate, but it doesn't raise blood sugar and also doesn't cause any of that GI distress that you can get with some of those sugar alcohols. And it's suitable for people with diabetes. So here's a study on Subjects with type 2 diabetes or impaired handling of blood glucose. Ingestion of allulose not only didn't affect blood glucose, but also improved metabolic handling and lower glycemic responses of high glucose carbohydrates. That is a massive win, win, win, by the way. And again, it used to be that they made you report the calories. Even the body wasn't absorbing it. They were on the label, which was confusing. And so now you're going to see a lot more use of this. This is an amazing new find so I'm just going to give you those shout outs again. We've got stevia, monk fruit, allulose, sugar, alcohols, and specifically erythritol and xylitol. And then of course cinnamon and vanilla. Lots to choose from and try a blend. But then also remember we want to retrain your sweet tooth to appreciate savory and spicy, so don't go crazy with with this stuff. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetoj.com.

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