Have you ever eaten a spoonful of yogurt and thought, “That leaves an odd aftertaste.”
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Maybe you’ve noticed the unique taste — and maybe you haven’t.
Whether your palate is sensitive to them or not, artificial sweeteners are everywhere. You may be consuming them daily without realizing.
Many of them were popularized in the s and praised for their low calories and efficient production cost. Today, they are commonly discussed in a dieting context, but most people aren’t aware of how often they are used in everyday grocery store products.
If you’re not checking your ingredient labels, you are likely consuming artificial sweeteners regularly… and that’s not good news for your health.
Here’s our breakdown of artificial sweeteners: the good, the bad, and the even worse.
Table of Contents:
Just in case clever marketing and health trends have made you forget, sugar — as in glucose — is necessary for human survival. Our bodies naturally crave and depend on glucose for energy and vitality. But the method in which we consume that sugar can deeply impact our health and wellness — even down to a cellular level.
Processed sugars, for example, are absolutely unhealthy when consumed regularly.
Especially when paired with toxic oils and food additives, they may promote things like:
But what alternatives do we have to processed sugars? And are artificial sweeteners the better option?
Despite marketing as “zero calorie” or “sugar free,” artificial sweeteners aren’t the risk-free alternative they’ve been made out to be.
Thanks to heavy processing methods and artificial ingredients, our food vocabulary has expanded in recent years. Understanding the difference between natural sugar, processed sugar, and artificial sweeteners can help you make healthy food choices based on facts.
Found in fruits, veggies, and whole grains (yep, these are all broken down into glucose in the body), natural sugar is anything that hasn’t been processed or refined. Two of our favorite natural sugars for baking or adding to your coffee include maple syrup and raw honey. If you’re craving something sweet, this is the best way to consume sugar (besides eating whole fruit).
Regular cane sugar, sugar beets, monk fruit sweetener, stevia, and agave nectar are all considered processed sugars. While they maintain more natural properties than artificial sweeteners, they still lose a lot of vital nutrients during the refinement process. Many of the vitamins, minerals, and fiber are lost — providing very little nutrients to the body.
In some cases, these sugars may drastically spike blood sugar levels, due to the loss of fiber. Cane sugar and sugar beets are great examples.
Although they are marketed as a “healthy” alternative to sugar, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Actually, artificial sweeteners are cheaper to produce, so companies can earn more profit when they’re sold.
High fructose corn syrup, aspartame, and Splenda (some examples of artificial sweeteners) are made in a lab. They’ve already been linked to numerous medical conditions and should be avoided at all costs. Since some of them taste several times sweeter than natural sugars, they also have the ability to skew your sense of taste when it comes to sweet foods, making you crave more and more to satisfy your sweet tooth.
Sugar substitutes come in a wide variety. Some are extremely bad for you (read: linked to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, weight gain, and insulin resistance), while others seem to provide promising results to curb sugar cravings.
We go by this rule of thumb: the more natural, the better.
The good, the bad, and the even worse. This chart shows which sugar substitutes are worth a try and which ones should stay in the lab.
The modern food industry is always trying to draw us toward the latest and greatest. A sugar substitute claims to be lower on the glycemic index, lower in calories, and better for digestion — and we all buy in. But after a few studies, we begin to realize the massive health risks of feeding our bodies unnatural foods.
Then another bigger and better sugar substitute comes out of the woodwork… and the cycle begins again.
It’s our belief that we should always go back to nature as our guide to food. Sweeteners that have been used for thousands of years, like raw honey and maple sugar, are not only not harmful to our bodies (in moderation), but they include benefits like antioxidants, minerals, vitamins, and so much more. Can your favorite artificial sweetener do that?
At the end of the day, tried and tested advice around sugar consumption remains the same as it has been for many years. Eat sweet things in moderation — and limit your consumption of processed foods (this will cut down a lot on your sugar consumption). When using sweeteners at home (for baked goods or coffee and tea), opt for healthier options like maple sugar or honey and in some cases, monk fruit or stevia if you have no digestive issues with them and prefer a blood sugar friendly option.
Cane sugar is a traditional food — used across the globe as a sweetener for virtually everything. Why are concerns about sugar just now (as in the last decade or so) coming to light?
One of the reasons is that we’re consuming more sugar than ever before (Seriously, sugar consumption has increased 30% in the last 3 decades).
Another reason is because so many people are struggling with digestive issues and autoimmune disorders — both often driven by inflammation.
Studies show that sugar is inflammatory — and with our consumption increasing, it’s no wonder people are becoming more sensitive.
In addition to watching your sugar intake, one of the ways you can protect your gut and target systemic inflammation is by incorporating butyrate into your supplement routine.
Our sweet journey continues. We have left sugars and sugar alcohols behind, and have now arrived at the third stop. Here we find a colourful mix of highly processed, sugar-like products. We’re talking about glucose syrup, isoglucose, invert sugar, and the like.
Ingredients that are about as sweet as sugar and that takes up about the same amount of volume are sometimes called bulk sweeteners. Sweeteners, as they bring sweetness to the product. Bulk, as they, just like sugar, have a relatively low sweetness in relation to their weight and volume and is therefore needed in larger amounts.
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The sugar types and sugar alcohols we have already looked at in the previous article are examples of bulk sweeteners. But there are more of them. The remaining ones are produced industrially through chemical processes in which starch or sugar is transformed into something similar to sugar or syrup. In this article, we will look closer at four of them.
Glucose syrup is also known as just glucose. It’s a liquid blend that gets its sweetness from glucose, maltose and maltodextrin, which are all the result of splitting starch. Sometimes fructose is added to increase the sweetness.
Glucose-fructose syrup is a glucose syrup with more than 5 per cent added fructose but with more glucose than fructose. Not to be confused with fructose-glucose syrup.
Isoglucose is also called fructose-glucose syrup, high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS for short. It’s a liquid blend of glucose, fructose and maltodextrin, produced by splitting starch to glucose syrup and then turning maltose to fructose.
Invert sugar is a liquid blend of glucose and fructose, produced from regular sugar.
Bulk sweeteners and their sweetness relative to regular sugar, glycaemic index (GI) with white bread as a reference, and energy content. Bulk sweetener Sweetness GI Energy Glucose syrup 30–60 % 90–150* 4 kcal/g Glucose-fructose syrup 35–100 %* 90–150* 4 kcal/g Isoglucose 80–100 % 81–95 4 kcal/g Invert sugar 120 % 84 4 kcal/g * Estimation in absence of a reliable source.Glucose syrup is produced from starch, which often comes from potatoes, wheat or corn.
Starch is chains of glucose molecules. By dissolving starch in water and adding acid or enzymes, or both, and heating the blend, starch is broken down into smaller chains of glucose molecules (maltodextrin) which in turn is broken down into even smaller ones, and so on. This is called hydrolysis.
The result is glucose syrup – a blend of glucose, maltose (two glucose molecules) and maltodextrin. Glucose syrup can thus be described as the result of hydrolysis of starch.
The quality of the glucose syrup is calculated as a percentage by mass of the dry matter. This percentage is called dextrose equivalent (DE).
Complete hydrolysis turns all starch into glucose (DE = 100) but also gives rise to bitter degradation products. Glucose syrup is most commonly used with DE = 42 and DE = 70. To be termed glycose syrup DE must be at least 20. At below 20, it is referred to as maltodextrin.
Glucose syrup is used more and more as it’s cheaper than sugar. It is also used to prevent crystallisation of regular sugar, to increase viscosity and to preserve moisture.
Glucose is less sweet than regular sugar. To compensate this there is a glucose syrup with added fructose, which is sweeter than regular sugar.
If the glucose syrup contains more than 5 per cent fructose but the level of glucose is larger than the level of fructose, the result is called glucose-fructose syrup. All counted as dry matter.
Glucose syrup is also the starting point for the production of isoglucose, also known as fructose-glucose syrup. Isoglucose which is produced from starch from corn is called corn syrup, or HFCS (high fructose corn syrup).
The production of isoglucose starts with starch which is hydrolysed with acid and two different kinds of enzymes. The result is glucose syrup, to which enzymes are added which cause the atoms to realign so that the glucose turns into fructose. This is called isomerisation.
The result is an isoglucose which consists of 42 per cent fructose, 50–52 per cent glucose and 6–8 per cent maltodextrin.
With high-performance liquid chromatography, the level of fructose can be concentrated to 90 per cent. This is rarely used in foods.
Finally, you can blend a 42 per cent isoglucose and a 90 per cent isoglucose to a blend with 55 per cent fructose. This blend is most similar to sugar in sweetness. It’s used in for example sodas.
Invert sugar is also a blend of glucose and fructose. It’s produced in a similar way to glucose syrup but starts with regular sugar instead of starch.
Regular sugar has molecules that are composed of glucose and fructose. By dissolving sugar in water and adding acid, enzymes, or both, and heating the blend, the sugar is broken down into glucose and fructose.
The result is invert sugar, consisting of 50 per cent glucose and 50 per cent fructose. Invert sugar can thus be described as the result of hydrolysis of regular sugar.
Invert sugar is industrially produced as a 65–73 per cent aqueous solution.
Invert sugar is just as sweet as regular sugar, but it has a better preservative function than saccharose. It’s also used to control crystallisation in sugar confectionery products.
Glucose syrup and isoglucose are cheaper than regular sugar. Invert sugar is more expensive but has a better preservative function, limits crystallisation and has another few aces up its sleeve. So that makes bulk sweetener better than regular sugar, doesn’t it?
Absolutely not!
From a health perspective, they are even worse than regular sugar.
Strictly, glucose syrup has the same number of calories as regular sugar, but as glucose syrup only has 30–60 per cent of the sweetness of regular sugar, you need up to 2.5 times more glucose syrup than sugar to get the same sweetness. This means 2.5 times more calories.
When it comes to GI it gets even worse. Glucose syrup consists practically exclusively of the two regular sugar types which have a higher GI than regular sugar. Glycaemic index for glucose is 138 and for maltose 150. That’s 50 and 63 per cent respectively, higher than regular sugar.
Isoglucose and invert sugar are both a blend of about equal parts glucose and fructose – just like regular sugar. But where regular sugar is digested in your body, isoglucose and invert sugar are digested in the factory. The glucose and fructose are freed and can easily be digested by the body, where they will increase the blood sugar level and turn into fat, respectively.
More and more consumers are avoiding highly processed bulk sweeteners. It’s not the high level of processing that goes into producing them that is the scariest part, but new research that in media is presented as alarming reports on ‘monster sugars’.
Terrifying stuff! Let’s keep looking.
In our next article, the journey continues. Then we will look at artificial sweeteners.