 Healthiest sugar alternatives. All right, I know sugar is bad, you know sugar is bad, but what the heck, what are you gonna do instead? Let me run through some of my favorite alternative sweeteners. First up is monk fruit. So monk fruit is small, green, gore that resembles a melon. It's up to 200 times sweeter than table sugar. I particularly like a brand called Lakonto. And quite frankly, I have no affiliation with anything I'm gonna show you here today, except my own product, which we'll talk about in a minute. You can get chocolate sweetened with monk fruit from Lakonto and others. It's got a probably one of the closest to real sugar taste on the market. Another one that unfortunately you can only find usually in a powder form, which is called inulin. Now inulin is the sugar in chicory and it's also in chicory root. It's also the sugar in yacon root, which I'll get to in a minute. Inulin is really one of the preferred prebiotics for your healthy gut microbiome. It has a slightly sweet taste, but you're gonna need to use more teaspoon per teaspoon to get the sweet taste you want. Now there is a product that uses Stevia that also has inulin in it. And it's called sweet leaf. It combines Stevia with inulin. The reason I like sweet leaf is Stevia in general has a very bitter taste and most people can spot that bitter taste, but combining Stevia with inulin kind of stops that bitter taste. So look for sweet leaf. It also comes in drops that are flavored and you can use it for flavoring, for instance muffins in a mug in my book. Now speaking of inulin, it's a little hard to find, but it's worth looking for yacon syrup. Yacon is actually a cousin of sunflower and the roots of yacon is where yacon syrup comes from. There's some very good studies in humans showing that yacon consumption actually fights diabetes and promotes weight loss. And that's because yacon is rich in polysaccharides that feed good gut bacteria. But you gotta be careful. A lot of people confuse yacon syrup with agave nectar. And I've seen a number of people think that agave is yacon. In fact, some of my own patients bring this in and said, look, I found yacon syrup. Is that okay? And I go, no, that's agave. And that is just pure sugar. Let me give you an example. One teaspoon of agave nectar has four teaspoons of sugar. You heard me right. Four teaspoons of sugar and one teaspoon of this. On the other hand, yacon syrup has a half a teaspoon in a teaspoon of this. Totally different. Don't confuse the two. Unfortunately, I see it with my patients. Now you can also find my favorite sweetener, which is called alulose. Now alulose is unique. Alulose is a true sugar. It's a rare sugar. It was first discovered in figs. Alulose has incredible prebiotic potential. It's actually the first sweetener that's been approved by the FDA as a prebiotic. And that's remarkable. There's very good studies that adding alulose to your coffee stops the blood sugar spike that coffee usually causes. And there's some very interesting studies in humans and obese rats that adding alulose to their diet without changing anything else actually lowered weight. I'm so impressed with alulose that I'm really happy to announce that Gundry MD now has our own alulose sweetener. And so it's becoming more and more easy to find, but you can find it right here at Gundry MD. There's also a few other sweeteners that I've talked about in the past because they were available. They are the sugar alcohol sweeteners, like xylitol, like malatol, like erythritol. And they're in a lot of my recipes, but I'm changing over as we go along your recipes based on alulose because it's just a better sweetener and it has actual health benefits. The sugar alcohols are fine, except you gotta be careful with them because a number of people get gas and bloating and stomach upset and diarrhea because they can actually, if you will, overfeed bacteria. So if you've tried those in the past and really aren't happy, a switch over to one of these alternatives, but my new go-to is alulose, not because I make it. I make it because I was so impressed using alulose for the last year and a half and I said, we've gotta offer this to Gundry MD customer. All right, so that's the top of my list. Now, what do you wanna avoid? First of all, you gotta avoid all of the products that use artificial sweeteners, things like Splenda, things like Aspartame. These are really mischievous. Splenda is better known as sucralose. Unfortunately, so many ready-to-eat bars, so many soft drinks that say no sugar added, still use one of these artificial sweeteners, particularly sucralose, as their sweetener. In fact, a Duke University study in 2007 showed that one packet of Splenda, aka sucralose, actually killed off 50% of your gut bacteria. And study after study showed that these artificial sweeteners actually promote weight gain, partially because they're changing your gut bacteria for a bad set of bacteria. Also, remember, any of these sweeteners, your tongue has no sugar receptors, it has sweet receptors. In fact, two thirds of your tongue are sweet receptors. Why? Because way back when, we needed fruit to gain weight for the winter. So we would seek out the sweetness in fruit and we would eat more and more of it. When you have a non-caloric sweetener that hits the sweet receptors, your brain has no idea that a non-sugar substance could be hitting your tongue, because it didn't exist. Your brain assumes you ate sugar. It actually increases your insulin to get ready for the sugar. Your insulin crashes, your blood sugar. Your brain says, hey, wait a minute, no sugar arrived. You've been cheated, go back and find some more. And one of the reasons I was 70-pound overweight because I was drinking eight Diet Cokes a day and I was constantly hungry because my brain kept telling me, you got cheated, go find some more. And another Diet Coke, and another Diet Coke would do the same thing. All right, what do you want to avoid? Be careful of things that sound natural. Natural sugar is still sugar. You can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig, which is on my ties. So, turbinado cane sugar is cane sugar, maple syrup. For instance, two tablespoons of maple syrup has 24 grams of sugar divide by four because there's four grams of carbohydrate in a teaspoon of sugar. Two tablespoons of maple syrup has six teaspoons of sugar. That's two tablespoons of sugar. Yet you see, oh, maple syrup has no sugar. It's maple syrup, it's nonsense. It's still pure sugar. I've already talked about how you can be duped by agave syrup and coconut sugar. This is one of the latest dupes. Unfortunately, there are actually eight grams of carbohydrate in two tablespoons and there's eight grams of sugar. There's two teaspoons of sugar per serving. And what you're going to find out is two tablespoons of coconut sugar doesn't sweeten enough and you're going to use more and more. So please, don't be fooled by what sounds natural. Sugar is sugar is sugar. No matter what form it sounds natural in, if you're going to need sweetening, these are the ones to go for. And like I said, my new favorite is allulose. Try it, I think you're going to be really impressed. I think you're going to love this one. Because mushrooms have incredible properties that you should know about to improve your health, your brain health and your longevity.