Sweeteners

If you're not sitting down reading this, you might just want to, or grab onto something for support, because I'm going to start this post out doing something I don't all that often: praise Mark Sisson.   The sample menu page on his blog reads:

A typical breakfast for me is a cup of coffee with cream and sugar and an omelet

This page has been around for a good long time and he hasn't changed it, so presumably Sisson hasn't jumped headlong on the stevia wagon.  In the summer, as a kid, we would suck on honeysuckle blossoms for the faint sweetness.  Needless to say, we did this more for the novelty of "hey, this is sweet" than scavenging for every blossom we could find for a sweet kick ... they just weren't that sweet.   If one googles chewing and sugarcane or stevia leaves you will find references to both.    If you are ever in New England in late winter/early spring, you'll see the maple syrup taps on trees.  The dried syrup that may ooze from the tap, etc., also tastes sweet.  We humans tend to like sweet stuff, and when found in nature, we'll chew/suck or otherwise extract the sweet leaving the rest behind.  But the only foods that are truly sweet eaten whole (or at least most) are fruits and honey.  I suppose we could add in the faintly sweet root veggies as well.  

With all the demonization of fructose lately, good old fashioned sugar has been given a bad rap.  Indeed these days we have Gary Taubes on record (a post for another day - grin) saying you can probably eat to your heart's content of pasta and rice and potatoes and not get fat so long as you don't eat sugar like those sugar-shunning Japanese.  The list of anti-sugar tomes is quite long and getting longer.  It is eeeeevil ... worse than crack cocaine!  The cause of the obesity epidemic and the root of all disease.  Not to mention, addictive as all get-out (another post for another day).  But allow me to wax poetic on my childhood for a moment.  It was typical and atypical in that at home there was little sugar to be found.  I think the way I was fed growing up was very WAPF-friendly.  But as a small child I did have access to sugar at my Grandma's house.  Once in school I was somehow amazingly able to trade or otherwise be given some of the sugary treats my classmates brought for snacks or birthday parties.  While my generation didn't grow up with juice boxes attached to our lips, we did have Kool Aid and Tang (marketed to a generation where we watched Apollo launches in the classroom).  At camp, fruit punch was called "bug juice".  Don't get me started on Pixy Stix and  Lik M Ade, both of which were nothing more than flavored sugar.  And we got little lollipops at the pediatrician's office.

Now, I'm certainly not advocating reverting the SAD back to the 60's version.  Nor am I advocating making sucrose a staple in your diet.  But sucrose has been demonized in an unfair manner, IMO.  If one wants to blame HFCS for certain modern woes -- that it is not equivalent to sucrose after all -- be my guest.  I have no need for such in the food supply, and at the risk of getting political, the tariff/subsidy system vis a vis sugar and  corn is nothing short of criminal.  But sugar is a NATURAL sweetener.  Sure white sugar goes through a fair amount of processing (producing molasses as well), but what of some of these sugar alcohols?  Xylitol is often called "wood sugar", although processing from wood is where the term came from, production from corn (yikes!) is quite common these days.  

 

Ditto the darling sugar alcohol amongst low carbers and many paleos alike, erythritol.    That link is to Cargill Foods, and I'm revealing for the first time today, that Cargill was one of the Big Agra players behind that anonymous bunny-eared internet persona.  (At this point full apologies have been made for that, apologies graciously accepted, but it is still funny to think that I might somehow have been a plant to bring down low carbing somehow so I reserve the right to joking references - grin).    Back to erythritol.  Market as "zerose" by Cargill, it is produced by fermentation from corn.  Indeed corn is the source of many sugar alcohols.  But erythritol has become a darling for a few reasons:

• it is virtually zero calorie at 0.2 cal/g  
• it is sugar like and can act as a vehicle, eliminating the need for bulking agents such as maltodextrin 
• it is small and absorbed before it gets to the intestine so produces none of the digestive upset characteristic of other sugar alcohols. 

Although processors claim the product of fermentation is no different from that extracted from plant fibers, a claim that is technically true, I hope we can all agree that the product at right, is no more "natural" than good old fashioned white sucrose.  

How about stevia?  While I'm sure small scale extraction of such a relatively potently sweet compound is quite simple, don't look now, but the stevia in your favorite economical products these days probably came from a rather more industrialized source.  That's right folks, perhaps Big Agra's motives in planting old CarbSane in the LC community was just a diversionary tactic all along.  Because, don't look now, but in 2007 Coca-Cola and Cargill  are/were the big movers and shakers behind the now-widespread availability of cheap stevia, and the US firm Blue California claimed a cheap industrial means of producing stevia.

 

And so, readers, I do find the flocking of paleos and naturalist low carbers alike to products such as Truvia, consider this post a public service message from mole-turned-whistleblower CarbSane, and consider a donation to my cause as you would to support other down-trodden whistleblowers!  Because Truvia is:

a stevia-based sugar substitute developed jointly by Coca-Cola and Cargill. It is currently distributed and marketed by Cargill as a tabletop sweetener and as a food ingredient.

The most interesting thing as I've been writing this post is that I didn't know any of Cargill's involvement in this when I started the post.  I was just going to do an off-the-top-of-my-head sort of post on what I see as inconsistencies with regards to what makes something an acceptable "natural" sweetener.  It was just in the quick searches on processes that this all fell in my lap.  

In the end, Sisson makes a good case for incorporating the real deal into a low carb paleolithic-based diet.  I actually did something similar on my VLC days back in 2007-8.  It was a rare day when you wouldn't find a bag of my beloved Lindor Truffles in the cabinet (forget the %, the black dark-chocolate kind) or a can of light whipped cream in my fridge.  Both contain real sugar.  The truffles are 5g carb each, a good squirt of whipped cream even less.  I do use artificial sweeteners as I insist on having my coffee sweet and that would require too much sugar for my tastes, so Splenda it is (liquid sucralose actually).  And if I do drink alcohol, it's vodka in diet soda.  I don't care much for erythritol, and stevia is even more disagreeable to my palate.  So sucralose it is, even on cheat days (I consider alcohol enough of a cheat) except for those things that don't belong sweetened by anything but sugar.  By that I mean if I'm having chocolate it is the real thing, though milk chocolate is waaay too sweet for me these days (while anything north of about 70% is just gross and I'll never understand why anyone would bother eating it).  Ditto for the occasional cake/pastry/pie.  

So in conclusion,  if your goal is more natural ancestral eating, I'd say good old sucrose more appropriately belongs in your diet than any of these other "natural" alternatives.  At the very least, they are no better and possibly worse.    You will probably do better to "own" your intake of sweets in terms of the calories, because that's really where they get you in trouble.