Monday, February 23, 2009

Choosing an artificial sweetener.

As I was saying, I was used to drinking at least 3 cups of tea every day with lots of sugar and a good bit of half-and-half. And when you have done that for half a century, give or take a few years, its pretty difficult to give it up.

In fact, one ethnic variation, the Indian spiced tea involves boiling the tea in equal parts of water and milk and adding sugar and cardamom to it, thereby giving it a dessert-like quality. Sugar was the main ingredient in the tea for me. It provided the perfect capper for me after dinner or lunch.

So I was pretty bummed out. Equal and Sweet'N Low powder in packets did not have a good feel and had an aftertaste. Splenda was the least offensive of them all.

It was not until later that I found out a very critical factoid about the artificial sweeteners. All the powdered packet kind contain one very nasty ingredient. Maltodextrin. Believe it or not, maltodextrin causes blood sugar to rise fast.

Yeah.. how do you like that? The artificial sweetener that you are picking as a substitute for sugar and thus aiming to avoid a sugar spike......well, the sweetener itself causes a spike because of the maltodextrin in it. The reason why manufacturers of the sweeteners add maltodextrin is to give bulk to the sweeteners. So that these synthetic powders will look and feel like sugar.

And the marketing campaigns launched by these brands can make the claim that these artificial sweeteners are just like sugar. In fact, as their commercials emphasize the "just like sugar" theme. " You can use 1 teaspoonful of Splenda instead of one teaspoonful of sugar in your cooking and your recipe will not be affected at all", they tout.

Plus the bulking agent, maltodextrin costs less and adds more weight to the sweetener so that the companies can get more revenues per ounce from them.

Another interesting point of fact is that all the powdered sweeteners can claim zero carbohydrates as long as they contain less than 1 gram of carbohydrate - that is the federal law. So even though you might be expecting no impact on your blood sugars from Splenda, Equal or Sweet'N Low,in actuality, if you add 3 to 4 packets to a large Starbucks size coffee container you are consuming almost 3-4 grams of carbs. If you have 4 such mugs in a day, you may be racking up a goodly number of carb grams without even thinking about it.

So what is the solution?

After doing a great deal of research, I homed in on Equal tablets. Not the Equal powder, Huge difference between the powder and the tablets. The Equal tablets do not contain any maltodextrin. They are sold in a Pez dispenser like box for $2.99. 100 tablets in each dispenser.

Unfortunately, Jewel and Dominick's in the Chicago area do not carry them. Only Treasure Island does. After I started using them, I tested my blood sugars to confirm that they did not have any effect. And they did not. In a few days, I became used to the taste.

The Equal tablets took care of my need to sweeten tea. But they were not good for much more than that. I did make cheesecake using crushed Equal tablets a few times and that worked fine.

I was not done with sweeteners though. I still had more work to do.

I began my search for a sugar-free syrup that I could use to create impromptu desserts with. Again, after a lot of looking, I chose DaVinci Gourmet syrups. These are made with Splenda but not the retail Splenda powder which contains maltodextrin.

Merisant Company, Splenda's manufacturer sells non-maltodextrin added Splenda to commercial accounts such as DaVinci. These sugar-free syrups are sold in wine bottles and come in many different flavors. I get them online either from DaVinci directly or from a third party for about $7.99 per bottle plus shipping.

Sometimes, Marshalls or T.J. Maxx stores have them on their shelves. But only a handful of flavors. Their price is fantastic though. Only $5.99 per bottle.

One simple and convenient dessert I came up with and use every other day is to add Raspberry or Strawberry flavored DaVinci Gourmet sugar-free syrup to full fat plain yogurt. Just mix it well and it is ready to be had. Satisfies my sweet tooth every time.

Now you might ask why full fat yogurt? Why not lowfat or nonfat yogurt in keeping with the overall theme of healthfulness. That will be the subject of my next post. This applies to choice of milk as well.

No comments:

Post a Comment