Discerning good sweeteners from bad ones

BY REBECCA WOOD
For the Mail Tribune

If you’re one of the many people who suffer from sugar cravings (as did I for decades), you can free yourself. I have, and so have many of my students. Here’s what we’ve discovered.

When a meal satisfies, you don’t nibble on carbohydrates between meals. When, however, you skip a meal, or you eat sweets that are empty of other nutrients, then you’ll feel empty and reach for something to fill the hole. It’s predictable.

So your first step in freeing yourself from the sugar teeter-totter (and to prevent diabetes) is to, as your mother admonished, eat three good meals a day.

This takes some doing as packaged foods and restaurant meals often fall far short. Because their denatured ingredients lack oomph, they can’t deeply satisfy. Furthermore, most are laced with cheap sugars or— even worse —with faux sweeteners that actually goad your cravings for more sweets.

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Let’s examine the quality sweeteners so that, as part of a good diet, you can enjoy a great cookie — and stop there. In order to skillfully navigate through marketing hype to discern the good sweeteners, I’ll also mention the ones to avoid.

But first, it’s useful to reflect that no sweetener is a whole food; each has had something removed to concentrate its sugars. Nectar is refined by bees into honey, maple sap is concentrated into maple syrup, and cane’s fiber and nutrients are removed to make table sugar. Your opportunity is to avoid the empty ones and to delight in the minimally refined sweeteners that retain their trace minerals and rich flavor.

CANE SUGAR: Worldwide, the most common sweetener is table sugar (sucrose), which is typically extracted from sugar cane. The most wholesome cane products have their trace nutrients intact. Two such domestically available cane sugars, Rapadura and Sucanat, are 90 percent crystalline sucrose enveloped in 10 percent mineral-rich cooked cane juice. Of the two, I find Rapadura more flavorful and satisfyingly sweet.

Rapadura and Sucanat are available in quality food stores and on line. (In import stores they’re available as jaggery, gur, piloncillo or panela.) Use them cup for cup as you would sugar in any recipe. Whole sugars imbue a buff to tan color and wonderful flavor to your finished dish.

In comparison, white sugar is 99.85 percent sucrose and tastes harsh, cloyingly sweet and one-dimensional. Chemically pure sucrose, like any drug, plays havoc in your system. Also, avoid the numerous highly refined cane products that attempt to convey a healthful image but are as drained of nutrients as is white sugar. (An exception is blackstrap molasses, the mineral-rich by-product of sugar cane production.)

CANE SWEETENERS MASQUERADING AS "HEALTHFUL": Typically, the following cane products are refined to pure sucrose and then "painted" with a little molasses to lightly color and flavor the sugar.

They are NOT recommended because they lack trace nutrients. Unfortunately "natural," "whole" and "unrefined" are open terms without legal protection.

Brown Sugar

Demrerara

Evaporated Cane Juice

Florida Crystals

Muscovado

Naturally Milled Organic Cane Juice

Organic Plantation Milled Sugar

Organic Whole Cane Sugar

Raw sugar

Sugar-in-the-Raw

Turbinado

Unrefined Cane Juice

Whole Cane

Yellow-D

Honey

Take away the water from honey and it’s about as sugary as white sugar. Honey does, however, retain nearly all of the flower nectars’ original nutrients. In comparison to table sugar, it is "minimally" refined.

Favor local, unpasteurized, wild flower honey. Buying locally supports the local economy and, if you have pollen allergies, may decrease your allergic response to pollen. Unlike pasteurized honey, raw honey is not mucus-forming and it retains its medicinal properties (it helps ease constipation and fluid retention, and, according to Oriental medicine, tones the pancreas).

Because of wild flowers’ genetic diversity, honey gathered from wild blossoms is superior in flavor and essence to cultivated crops, like clover or orange.

At the Rogue Valley Grower’s Market, I buy honey from Wild Bee Honey Farm in Eagle Point. You can reach them at 826.7621.

Their blackberry honey has a wonderful fruity aroma and taste. Whereas, their poison oak honey is deeply sweet but leaves an almost persimmon-like tingle on my tongue. Given my druthers of a poison oak rash or its antidote, I say, "Yes!" to the tingle in a spoonful of honey.

Other Sweeteners

As with sugar, your guideline for judging quality sugar alternatives is to favor those which are minimally refined and higher in trace nutrients. Because the following are higher in fructose and/or maltose, some people regard them as more healthful than white sugar.

With all purchases, read labels carefully and bypass any product that contains cheap additives like corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose or artificial sweeteners.

Agave Syrup The sap of a cactus-like desert plant, agave, is a remarkably abundant source of fructose (70%). This ranks it low on the glycemic index and makes it a healthy sweetener for non-insulin dependent diabetics. Thanks to agave syrup’s pleasant sweetness, versatility and moderate price, it is quickly becoming a popular food and beverage sweetener.

Maple and Birch Syrup Two excellent and delicious sweeteners are concentrated sap from maple and birch trees. The sap is collected and its water is reduced (historically by evaporation, today by reverse osmosis). While maple syrup comes from northeastern United States, birch syrup is produced in Scandinavia and Alaska. Both are energy intensive and therefore pricey — it takes 40 gallons of maple sap, or 80 gallons of birch sap, to make one gallon of pure syrup.

Grain Sweeteners Any grain can be malted into sweet, maltose-rich syrup. Enzymes digest the grains’ complex carbohydrates into a more simple sugar. Barley malt and rice or sorghum syrups are the most common.

(Corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup are pure hydrolyzed products devoid of trace nutrients and are not recommended. They’re cited by some nutritionists as leading causes of obesity.

Artificial Sweeteners — Not Recommended

The non-caloric sweeteners are a chemical rather than a food — please avoid them. Please note: When doing on-line research about their toxicity, you’ll find conflicting data. The manufacturers’ web pages claim their safety; numerous alternative publications report otherwise.

Of the artificial sweeteners, xylitol has been highly marketed as a "healthy" sweetener. Xylitol is dangerous — even life-threatening — for pets according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

A byproduct of the plywood industry, xylitol is a pure crystalline chemical, or hydrogenated polyol.

Yes, data correlates xylitol with the reduction of dental caries, however there are more wholesome ways of preventing tooth decay.

Neither do I recommend Acesulfame-K (Sunette, Sweet & Safe, Sweet One), Aspartame (Equal, Canderel and NutraSweet), cyclamates, saccharine or sucralose (Splenda).

Rebecca Wood is an award-wining cookbook author and local cooking teacher. To ask a question, to find a recipe or, or to post your comment about this article, visit: www.RWood.com

Recipe: Gluten-Free Shortbread Cookies
1 cup white or brown, short-grain rice (or 11/3 cup rice flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon sea salt
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
½ cup Rapadura or Sucanat (or other quality sugar)
2 large egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Heat oven to 350 F. Grease cookie sheet.
Grind rice in a flour or nut or seed mill (or use 11/3 cup rice flour). Stir in baking powder and salt. Set aside.
Cream butter and Rapadura until light and fluffy. Add yolks and vanilla and beat to incorporate. Fold in dry ingredients until blended. Pinch off pieces of dough and roll between palms of hands to form ¾ -inch balls. Set the balls 2 inches apart on a prepared cookie sheet. Flatten the cookies by pressing into each with the tines of a fork or with two fingers.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until the bottom is lightly browned and the cookies are lightly colored. The cookies are fragile when hot and so carefully transfer to a cooling rack (or allow to cool on the cookie sheet).
VARIATION: For raspberry tartlets, spread a cookie with raspberry jam (warm the jam if necessary to facilitate spreading). Arrange fresh raspberries on cookie. Makes 2 dozen cookies.
NOTE: When I want an exceptionally tender sugar cookie, I make this shortbread using rice flour and whole cane sugar. You may purchase rice flour or grind your own in a flour or nut or seed mill. When making your own rice flour, use only short-grain brown or white rice (curiously enough, long-grain rice flour yields a soggy, coarse crumb).