Sugar is sugar, no matter what it was before it was sugar.
I’ve never been much of a baker, and I’ve always taken my coffee black, so there’s rarely been a bag of sugar in my pantry. I’ve never given it much thought.
In my mid-20s, when I was trying to lose the freshman 25, I started reading nutrition labels. I would pass on salad dressings or crackers with added sugar. Though, by then, I had learned to shop the perimeter of the grocery store, and it was rarely an issue.
But I’ve been cooking a lot lately—like it’s only 12 days into the year and I’ve made 17 new recipes a lot. And some of those recipes call for sugar.
At the top of of the journal where I track I track my recipes and document the emotional rollercoaster of cooking 3,453 times a day, I wrote, is coconut sugar ok? Date sugar? Maple syrup?
A quick Google search revealed conflicting information. I didn’t have time to find the truth, and the recipe had to go on, so I chose coconut sugar, and I used only half of what the recipe called for.
It’s not that I’m not worried about my sugar intake. It’s that I’m worried my daughters will develop a taste for too sweet foods, which will quickly escalate into them protesting every bowl of mushroom lentil soup I put in front of them until I finally cave and take them to IHOP for cupcake pancakes.
This may not seem like a big deal to most people, but I am certain cupcake pancakes reduce your gut microbial diversity, and—after months in the NICU with more antibiotics than most adults take in their entire lives—I’ve spent the last 18 months trying to restore their gut microbiome.
(If you’re wondering what in the seven hells gut microbial diversity is, read this.)
Gut microbial diversity is likely the single greatest predictor of your long-term health.
The sugary, pasta-y, bready American diet feeds the inflammatory bacteria in your gut—so they are fruitful and multiply, and then they (and subsequently, you) want even more sugar, pasta, bread, and white rice. You end up starving the good bacteria and feeding the bad.
Over time, this can lead to a wide range of symptoms from acne and digestive issues to autoimmune and heart diseases.
So I go easy on the sugar, and I never use table sugar. But I’ve never had a solid scientific reason for passing on run-of-the-mill white sugar.
This week, I finally got though the 70 hundred gabgillion articles I had bookmarked on sugar, and made some cliff notes for those of you who care enough to read this, but don’t care enough to get up at 5am four days in a row to sift through research on sugar.
Both white sugar and raw sugar are made from the juice of the sugarcane plant. The juice is filtered, and boiled, and cooled, and crushed up into “raw” sugar. Table sugar goes through an additional layer of processing where it’s washed and crystallized to get that superfine, white sugar we all know and love.
Sugar impacts your brain, your teeth, your joints, your skin, your liver, your heart, your pancreas, your kidneys, your body weight, and your sexual health.
Some of the more notable takeaways from my trusted friends at WebMD are that when fructose is broken down in the liver it turns into fat, which can cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.
If that’s not enough to scare you, excess sugar creates excess insulin in your blood, which can affect the walls of the heart. They get inflamed, and thick, and stiff, which stresses your heart and can lead to heart disease, heart failure, heart attacks and strokes.
Kind of weird I didn’t find any of this information on sugar.org, right?
More searching yielded disappointing results.
The coconut sugar I’ve been using is no different from cane sugar. It’s derived from the buds of the coconut tree, mixed with water, boiled, cooled, and crystallized. The rich nutrients of the coconut palm, like iron, zinc, and potassium, are insignificant when the sap is turned into sugar. Coconut sugar’s only redeeming quality is that it contains the soluble fiber inulin which reduces blood sugar spikes. But I couldn’t find a link between reduced blood sugar spikes and reduced disease. So coconut sugar may cause fewer episodes of hanger, but not less obesity or heart disease.
Then there’s date sugar.
Unlike our other sweet friends, date sugar is made from the actual fruit of the date palm. It’s literally ground-up dates, which means it gets to keep all its nutrients. Though, you’d have to eat a lot for it to be nutritionally significant.
At the end of the cookie or the cup of coffee, date sugar and coconut sugar are still sugar, as are maple syrup and agave nectar, and anything else you use to sweeten your oatmeal and tea.
Dr. Michael Greger, author of How Not to Die and founder of nutritionfacts.org, recommends erythritol, a sugar alcohol that occurs naturally in some fruits and fermented foods. Greger says it’s possible that erythritol may be the only non-toxic, non-caloric sweetener. Research shows it may even be beneficial—turns out, it contains antioxidants.
I can’t get past the name. It sounds like it was made in a lab—because it was made in a lab. (To be fair, it was all made in a lab.) If my goal for my family is to eat foods as close to their natural form as possible, erythritol is not it.
After all this reading, and searching, and watching videos about sugar and its many alternatives, I will probably switch to date sugar because it’s marginally more nutritious and a little less processed, but my philosophy stays the same.
The goal is not to sweeten things without the side effects of sugar. The goal is to cultivate a palate that craves healthy whole foods, and I don’t think a quarter cup of sugar a week—in any form—between the four of us is going to sabotage that philosophy.