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Sugar and spice and everything nice--well, almost.
The trouble is that refined sugars don’t include anything nice. In fact, white, brown, and confectioners sugar can deplete your body of nutrients, causing damage to your vital organs if your overindulgence goes unabated. Artificial sweeteners can be equally dangerous; some have been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals, and headaches and depression in people.
Fortunately, you have a virtual cornucopia of better choices, so think twice when you choose what type of sweet to eat (you do want everything nice, right?). Here’s the lowdown on the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world of sweeteners.
The Good—Raw and Lightly Processed Sugars and Syrups
| Sweetener Name | What is it? | What’s so great about it? |
| Barley Malt Syrup and Brown Rice Syrup | Barley or rice that has been soaked, sprouted, and cooked down into syrup. | Composed primarily of maltose and complex carbohydrates, they are digested more slowly than other sweeteners, so they don’t make blood sugar levels yo-yo. |
| Maple Sugar/Syrup | Sap from the sugar maple tree that’s boiled down to thick syrup or a crystallized solid. It’s graded according to color and flavor; grade AA tastes closest to white sugar. | Among the least refined sweeteners available, they are flavorful and contain minerals such as zinc, iron, calcium, and potassium |
| Molasses | A byproduct of the production of cane sugar. There are three types: light, dark, and blackstrap. | All molasses contains minerals, but blackstrap, the last useable byproduct siphoned off before white sugar is bleached, contains more minerals and calcium than any other sweetener. |
| Raw Honey | Extracted from the nectar of flowers, raw honey contains trace amounts of minerals, enzymes, and pollen. | It’s as unrefined as sugar gets—straight from the bees to your table. (Just don’t feed it to children under one year old.) |
The Bad—Heavily Processed Sugars
| Sweetener Name | What is it? | Why is it bad? |
| Cane/Beet Sugar | Your everyday white table sugar, made from sugar cane or sugar beets. | Heavily processed, usually bleached. White sugar has no nutritional value; some call it “empty calories.” |
| High Fructose Corn Syrup | Cheaper than white sugar, high fructose corn syrup nevertheless takes a tremendous amount of effort to produce, and is used in many pre-packaged foods, sodas, and juices. | Some nutritionists believe that it plays a leading role in obesity, because fructose must be processed by the liver and is readily turned into fat. |
The Ugly—Non-nutritive Sweeteners
| Sweetener Name | What is it? | Why is it ugly? |
| Aspartame (Equal, Nutrasweet) | A lab-created chemical made from phenylalanine--an amino acid--and aspartic acid. | The body breaks it down in part into formaldehyde, a carcinogen. Some evidence suggests that it can cause brain tumors. |
| Saccharin (Sweet ‘N Low) | An entirely artificial, very sweet chemical combined with fillers such as dextrose, cream of tartar, and calcium silicate. | Causes bladder and other cancers in lab animals--hence the warning label. |
| Sucralose (Splenda) | White sugar with three chlorine atoms added to each sucrose molecule. | No one knows the long term effects of Splenda yet, but if its other calorie-free counterparts are any indication, it won’t be splendid. |
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