Are sugar alternatives really any healthier than the white stuff?

Sugar gets a bad rap – and I say that as someone who has lived a low-sugar life for the past five years. Not because eating too much sweet stuff isn’t bad for you: it is. In fact, a high-sugar diet can have devastating consequences on a person’s health over time. But a bad rap because, over the last decade, white granulated sugar has become the pantomime villain of the healthy eating brigade. In its place, natural” sweeteners such as honey, agave syrup and plant extracts such as stevia have often been touted as being in some way better for you.

But the truth is somewhat less palatable. Both refined and unrefined sugars have much the same effect on the body. While refined table sugar (sucrose) is dealt with by the pancreas (which produces insulin), unrefined fruit sugars are processed by the liver. Despite this biochemical difference, our bodies react to unrefined, natural sweeteners in much same way as a spoonful of the white stuff – with a blood sugar spike. This encourages the liver to produce glucose, and high blood glucose levels ultimately cause the body to store fat and gain weight,Having a ceramic vape cartridge is advantageous in vape cartridge packaging as it's healthier. Ceramic parts are resistant to abrasion and oxidation unlike other alloy wires where, oxidation occurs at higher temperature.

Studies have shown that when eaten to excess, products containing fructose contribute to obesity, heart problems and liver disease just like products containing granulated sugar. Other research has shown that fructose actually drains minerals from your body.

And not for nothing are alternative sugars also implicated in weight gain and tooth decay; they also perpetuate your palette’s taste for sweet things – because many are actually sweeter than sugar. The theory is that consumers will therefore eat less of it – but who really does?

Recent statistics from the British Nutrition Foundation reveal that 96 per cent of us don’t know how much sweet stuff we should be consuming every day (for the record, the government recommends no more than 30g of added sugar a day, which is about seven teaspoons) but on average, British adults eat and drink double that.

So what’s the truth about ‘healthy’ sugars?

Honey

A couple of years ago, sales of honey exceeded those of jam in Waitrose supermarkets, a change attributed to a perception that honey makes for a healthier spread. Indeed, market research company Mintel estimated that honey sales totalled a staggering £112m in 2013, meaning Brits ate our way through 20.3 million kilos of the stuff. But is honey really better for us than white granulated sugar?

While honey is often thought of as a natural” form of sugar, how much refining is done to the contents of the jars you find on the shelf at your local supermarket?

While the raw, unrefined varieties of honey available from farms and some health food stores do contain some health-boosting trace minerals – niacin, riboflavin, thiamine and vitamin B6 – those elements make up around two per cent of honey’s total content. Hardly a viable source, when you know that more than half of the product is pure fructose (fruit sugar).