War on Piece: Fake Sugar vs. Fruit Sugar

Dextrose, sucralose, fructose, glucose, ethanol. Also, simple syrup, stevia, agave, coconut. But as far as I’m concerned, there are only two types of sugars. The first type, what I call Fake Sugar, is sugar in a bag. Or in a box, baked into the foods inside of it. Fake Sugar comes in many forms and looks kind of pretty. The second type of sugar is what I call Fruit Sugar, the only healthy sugar. The sugar that remains in a fruit.

Unless the piece of fruit is dried, you’ll find Fruit Sugar existing in its water. The fruit’s water, or the fruit juice, is what keeps the fruit — and you — alive. Think of when you slice open a pineapple and the natural juice sticks to your fingers. That’s Fruit Sugar.

I’d argue that most of America’s health problems develop because of the way we talk (or don’t talk) about sugar. Sugar that comes from fruit, Fruit Sugar, and from milk, Lactose, affect our bodies differently than the sugar in processed foods affect them. Some of you can’t digest lactose very easily. None of us can digest Fake Sugar very easily. Yet, this knowledge is uncommon.

The Sugar Industry teaches us that sugar is as sugar does. When I eat fruit, even the fruit with the lowest glycemic load, people are shocked because there’s sugar in it. Then, I’ll hear this at the dinner table, as if fruit and pie share a biology: Let me have just a bite of dessert, but not too much. I can’t have the sugar. Sometimes I’ll see people buying ‘juice’ from gas stations, which is nothing but Fake Sugar made to look like Fruit Sugar. Trust me: no one there cracked open a coconut and collected its juice behind the checkout counter. Still, I understand the confusion. The labels read “High Fructose Corn Syrup,” and ‘fructose,’ a simple ketonic monsaccharide found in plants, is the scientific word for Fruit Sugar.

But High Fructose Corn Syrup is not the same as fructose, or Fruit Sugar. According to the articleHow Bad is Fructose? by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, healthy fructose still exists only in fruit:

“In fruit, fructose serves as a marker for foods that are nutritionally rich. However, in soft drinks and other ‘sweets,’ fructose serves to reward sweet taste that provides ‘calories,’ often without much else in the way of nutrition.”

Unfortunately, High Fructose Corn Syrup and other forms of Fake Sugar are not kept behind bars in a single corner of the grocery store. Fake Sugar is marketed to children, baked into breads, sweetening canned fruit and pasta sauces, and distributed on every aisle, including the health food aisles.

Fake Sugar even hides within bags and boxes covered in ‘health’ labels, such as natural, organic, gluten-free, vegan, non-gmo, and unrefined. Indeed, Nature permits no shortcuts; Just as youcan’t add a serving of Metamucil to a fresh glass of juice and call the concoction a fibrous fruit, you can’t process the fructose out of a coconut and call it Fruit Sugar.

Here is an example of how companies use the key marketing words organic, unrefined, and gluten-free to make a bag of Fake Sugar, which, in this case, is called Coconut Palm Sugar, appear to be good for you:

Also note that some companies add Fake Sugar to dried plants. When shopping for a bag of mixed nuts and dried fruit, I always check the list of ingredients for the word sugar — and typically find it.

For instance, pictured below are two different brands of organic coconut chips, a trendy health food. Whereas the first company adds Fake Sugar to the coconuts, more than tripling the amount of sugar in each serving, the second company dries and packages just the coconut:

“Sugars” here amount to 7 grams per serving, and there are 4 servings. Calculated with the disproportionate amount of dietary fiber in the natural coconut, there is a total of 44 grams of carbohydrate in the bag. As a diabetic, I’d have to inject 3 units of Humolog to digest all four servings and, because the majority of those carbohydrates are comprised of Fake Sugar, hope that my body responds to insulin and metabolizes it.

In this bag, produced by a different company, there are still four servings but only 2 grams of sugar. The dietary fiber is at 5 grams per serving, higher than the other bag. Because this bag contains just coconuts and no Fake Sugar, there are only 7g of carbohydrates per serving. For a total of four servings, there are 28g of carbohydrates, which is almost half the amount of carbohydrates found in the other bag. For this, I’d take only 2 units of Humolog, which falls in line with my rule of injecting insulin for 30g worth of carbohydrates or less.

Replacing Fake Sugar — whether it’s white, brown, coconut, or marketed as ‘organic’ — with a whole piece of fruit is a natural exchange. If you’re diabetic, refusing a piece of candy for a single date, which generally amounts to 15g of carbohydrates, is the best way we can pull up low blood sugars and free ourselves from the Fake Sugar industry, which influences the American healthcare system. If we make this one exchange, our doctors will begin noticing tighter control over blood sugar levels on a massive scale, whether their patients are diabetic or not.

Just remember that portion size matters, too — keep your insulin intake around 30g per meal and control yo self.