Dextrose

Who doesn’t love sweet? Not all sweeteners are created equal, especially Equal.

Most white table sugar is sucrose, purified, which usually comes from cane sugar or beets. It’s a product that your body has to work quite a bit to process into the kind of sugars that the human body uses: Glucose. Glucose is a monosaccharide or simple sugar. Your body processes it much better because it’s the sugar that feeds your cells.

One form of glucose, called D-glucose, has another name: Dextrose.

Some of y’all know your glycemic index. Lower glycemic sugars? Better?  Well, sort of.

Table sugar has fructose, which the human palette perceives of as sweeter, even though it is lower on the glycemic index. Your tongue is your sugar control center. It triggers the release of sugar receptors in your pancreas that don’t go anywhere until they get their sugars. Which is also why “fake” sugars, from Stevia to Sweet N’Low, make people more obese. They fool the tongue into thinking it’s getting a super-sweet treat, which means you create more receptors, which metabolize sugars from the other foods you eat. Diet Coke and a pie? You might have metabolized 80% of the sugar normally. Now you get 90-100% of that and sugars from other foods like pastas or breads.

So, even though Dextrose has a glycemic index of 100, Dextrose is not as sweet on the tongue as white table sugar to our brains. It doesn’t produce as much absorption. When it does absorb, though, your body has no trouble breaking it down because it’s a simple sugar that is part of you.

Time Magazine reported in 2009: “University of California Davis report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation that consuming too much fructose can actually put you at greater risk of developing heart disease and diabetes than ingesting similar amounts of glucose.”

Substitute it in recipes 1:1 with table sugar. If you make heavily sweet foods, you might need to “wean” your family off of table sugar by blending down for a while. Dextrose is great for applications where you’re curing meats, too.

It’s a popular sweetener in parts of the world where, not surprisingly, the obesity caused by High Fructose Corn Syrup and high amounts of sucrose in foods aren’t as common.

This 32 oz. bag is the right size for most kitchens. Now Foods dextrose gets my four-diamond Choicestuff™ nod for top-notch product that is one of the best from several good organic suppliers at a good price.