The Sugar Swap List

Part one — where it’s already coming from

Four grams is one teaspoon, so we’ve drawn it in teaspoons. A teaspoon is something you can picture. A gram isn’t.

one teaspoon    how much further it goes, brand to brand

The names it hides under

Manufacturers are not required to write “sugar.” Read the ingredient list, and count these as what they are:

corn syrup high-fructose corn syrup evaporated cane juice cane crystals fruit juice concentrate brown rice syrup barley malt dextrose maltodextrin sucrose fructose glucose lactose maltose caramel molasses syrup turbinado demerara

A useful rule: if three of those appear in one ingredient list, the product is a dessert wearing a health label.

Part two — use these

Dates, or date paste

Our first choice, and the one we reach for at home. Whole fruit with its fiber intact — blend a few soft dates with a little water and keep the paste in a jar. Works in oatmeal, dressings, baking, and blended into coffee.

Whole fruit

Mashed ripe banana, unsweetened applesauce, or a handful of berries will sweeten most things people reach for sugar to sweeten. The fiber comes along with it, which is the whole point.

Stevia

Fine, including the white extract most stores carry. Use it lightly — it is far sweeter than sugar and a heavy hand tastes like it.

Monk fruit — but read the label

Monk fruit on its own is fine. The catch is that almost every monk fruit product on the shelf is cut with erythritol or xylitol, and often those make up most of what’s in the bag. If the ingredient list says anything but monk fruit, put it back.

Coconut sugar, date sugar, blackstrap molasses

Fine in limited use. These are still sugar, but they arrive with some minerals attached and they behave better than the white stuff. Blackstrap in particular carries real iron and potassium.

Raw honey and pure maple syrup

Real foods, both of them, and there’s no reason to be frightened of a spoonful. Use them the way you’d use a good olive oil — deliberately, for flavor, not by the cupful.

Leave these

Agave

The one that surprises people. It has been marketed as the natural choice for twenty years and it is among the most concentrated fructose sweeteners on the shelf — higher than table sugar. There is no version of this we’d recommend.

Artificial sweeteners

Aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, acesulfame potassium. This is the belief we most want to correct: swapping sugar for these is not a step toward health. They keep the appetite for sweetness alive while giving the body nothing to do with it, and the research on what they do to the gut has not gone in their favor.

Sugar alcohols

Erythritol, xylitol, sorbitol, maltitol. Out — and worth knowing they are what most “keto” and “no sugar added” products are actually built on. They’re also the reason those products send some people running for the bathroom.

Refined sugar in all its disguises

White, brown, raw, powdered, and the whole list of aliases above. Brown sugar is white sugar with molasses added back; it is not a health food.

Two notes before you start

Where to begin

Pick one. Not the list — one.

For most people the drink is the fastest win, because it’s usually the biggest number and the easiest thing to change. Swap the soda or the bottled tea for water with lemon for one week and see what your afternoon feels like.

Then read one label. Just one. The pasta sauce is a good place to start.

Sweetness was never withheld from us. It came in peaches and dates and honey in the comb, wrapped in fiber and water and minerals, in a package the body knows what to do with. What changed in the last hundred years is not that we were given sweetness — it is that we stripped away everything it came with. Putting the package back is most of the work.

Blessings,
Paul & Ann

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