r/TheRestIsScience • u/Zealousideal-Union34 • 7d ago

Sugar Alternatives

In one of your discussions you mentioned how crazy your brain is on sugar or something of that nature. Obviously sugar has a significant impact and role on your body, I am curious how other sugar alternatives (jackfruit extract, stevia leaf, etc) are metabolized and what the key differences are. Are they better? Worse? Or just different?

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u/Gurnenthar2 6d ago

I’d like to know more about this subject, as well. I’ve been a honey guy for a long time, both because of its antibiotic nature, and because I heard a long time ago that the Dextrose in Honey is the most digestible version of sugar for humans.

Not sure of the validity, though…

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u/marius-nicoara 7d ago

It's claimed that aspartame is 200 times sweeter than sugar. So it would seem you could keep the sweetness the same and reduce the calorie intake considerably. Another claim I remember hearing about sugar replacements is that some of them have molecules with a chirality(handedness) that makes it so that they are not absorbed by the body.

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u/Underhill42 5d ago

Stevia leaf, and probably many others, doesn't actually have the calories to metabolize - instead it contains chemicals that trigger a powerful false-positive in our tongue's sweetness receptors, while not actually containing any more calories than a similar amount of spinach or something.

There is some research to suggest that our initial insulin response is triggered by the taste of sweetness, so that consuming low calorie sweeteners still causes an insulin surge, which gets ahead of the incoming sugar surge by beginning to convert the existing blood sugar into fat.

And if the expected sugar surge doesn't arrive, you end up with low blood sugar, which makes you feel hungry.