Clyde's opinion on how to best sweeten your food

Large amounts of sugar contribute to circulatory disease and cancer. But a moderate amount of sugar when part of an otherwise healthy diet (whole grains, big salads, more unsaturated than saturated fat, no trans fats, not excess in calories, food that is not charred, sufficient water intake) is NOT correlated to disease. I therefore am not a proponent of the complete elimination of all sugars from one's diet. However, if a person has a tendency to eat too much sugar, then whatever amount of sugar that exceeds 5-10% of their total caloric intake SHOULD be replaced by low-calorie sweeteners. Note that honey and agave nectar are just sugar with some water mixed in so that are liquid sugar instead of solid sugar. Dark honey has been shown to contain antioxidants (presumably true of agave nectar but not shown in the research literature yet), but vegetables are a shockingly better alternative to honey for obtaining antioxidants. Between honey and table sugar I would go with the honey, but honey is not so healthy that it's sugar content can be ignored. Low-calorie sweetener consumption should include all of the sweeteners in moderate amounts rather than any one sweetener in large amounts so as to reduce the long-term risks associated with one type of synthetic molecule entering your body many times per day for years on end. Stevia (stevioside) is a low-calorie sweetener derived from the South American plant of the same name. Steviol, a metabolic by-product of stevia produced in the human intestine is a mutagen, but long-term studies have not been done to see if this impacts human health significantly or not. For the time being, not even the FDA (!!) is comfortable enough with the science to allow for its use as a sweetener (although it can be used as a "food additive"; bizarre technical logistic FDA gyrations whose point I do not get). I posted a detailed discussion of the stevia/mutagen issue on the "low calorie sweeteners" thread of this blog. My ultimate advice is to allow yourself 5% (up to a maximum of 10%) of your tatal caloric intake to come from regular sugars (including table sugar, evaporated cane juice, honey, agave nectar, jelly) and use small amounts of low-cal sweeteners including stevia and synthetic sweeteners. I would not use more than a couple servings of any one type of sweetener (whether it contains calories like regular sugar or not) in any one day. NOTE that even dried fruit (particularly raisins and dates), 100% fruit jelly, concentrated fruit juice used as sweetener and 100% pure fruit juice ALL digest fairly quickly, enter the intestine quickly very few nutrients compared to the original high-fiber fresh fruit. In moderate amounts none of these things are "bad" for you, but replacing natural food for processed food (including juicing natural foods) reduces the fiber and nutrient content and makes the food one or two steps closer to pure sugar (or liquid sugar). A final thought to leave you with is that what matters is not just that you consume a broad spectrum of moderate amounts of many different sweeteners if you can not stay away from the taste of sugar, but that the broader the spectrum of healthy foods you eat the less the negative effects you will experience of the sweeteners. The foods we eat work together to produce a NET effect on our health (or lack of health, whichever the case may be).