How to choose a sweetener?
When we start a diet or lifestyle change, one of the very first things we should give up as soon as possible is white sugar.
Until we take this extremely important step, we will have a hard time making a breakthrough in losing weight and improving our health.
This can often seem like a drastic move, a decision that can be difficult to make right away.
It may be necessary to provide some level of transition, for which sweeteners or sugar substitutes are an excellent option.
However, we can easily get into a dilemma as to which sweetener is worth choosing to replace white sugar, as there is so much information circulating in our minds about this.
In this month’s blog post, we now want to help you choose the right sweetener with a few tips.
So, let’s see the different groups of sweeteners and their advantages and disadvantages:
-
Artificial sweeteners
They are sugar substitutes made from chemical ingredients, with no caloric value. Such ones are aspartame and saccharin.
-
Sugar alcohols
They are no sweeter than sugar. They have caloric value but less than sugar. They have nothing to do with alcohol. They are often found in ready meals such as chocolate, chewing gum or toothpaste. They are often combined with an artificial sweetener. The best known ones of these are xylitol and erythritol.
-
New sweeteners
Most new sweeteners are made from stevia extract. Also included are fructose oligosaccharides and trehalose.
-
Natural sweeteners
Such as fructose (fruit sugar), agave syrup, honey, maple syrup. They have basically the same number of calories and carbohydrates as sugar. They are safe, but they do not have many health benefits. If you eat a lot of these, your body weight and body fat will increase, you risk developing diabetes as well as you do it by using sugar. There is no doubt about their content of vitamins and minerals, but they are broken down in the body into glucose and fructose in the same way as sugar does.
Everyone swears by something else; a different type of sweetener can work for him or her. Don’t get frustrated when you may experience unpleasant side effects, as there are those who fall in love with one type, and other people who find another type of sweeteners more helpful. It is worth trying several things, not giving up. In the long run however, it is advisable not to consume too much of these helpful sweeteners either.
The good news, though, is that we will gradually be getting used to making our food less sweet, so we will need fewer and fewer sweeteners or sugar substitutes.
In the meantime, feel free to choose from our huge selection of sweeteners and sweetener products!