Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Are you thinking about kicking sugar in the new year?
[00:00:03] Speaker B: What about that sweet tooth?
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to Duster Mud podcast. Today we're going to go over what we do about our sweet tooth. We've been eating ketogenic diet for almost five years, and we like to eat sweets too.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: So we're going to discuss the different types of sweeteners that are out there in the world, along with the different products that we have found that work for our diet.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: If you want to know why, stick around to the end. We'll dive a little bit, not too deep, but a little bit down into the science of why did we make the choices that we made as far as sweeteners are concerned, the three main.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Sweeteners that we use in our house are stevia, monk fruit, and erythritol. The reason we use those three sweeteners is because they are naturally occurring in nature and they are listed as keto friendly. Why are they naturally, where do they come from?
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Stevia is a leaf from the stevia plant. Monk fruit is a fruit. And then erythritol is a sugar alcohol that is produced by the fermentation of starch in the United States, typically cornstarch.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Gotcha. What about that? Was it xylitol?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah, Xylitol. It's a naturally occurring like erythritol, except instead of fermenting starch with xylitol, you ferment hardwoods, like birch, they get sugar from wood. They do?
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Oh, it's like maple syrup.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah. But the difference is that it's fermented.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: So maple syrup actually causes a glycemic response right where the fermented sugar alcohols don't cause.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Okay, let's get into that in a minute. Okay. So we do like to eat sweet things. We have been keto for five years. And behind here I have on the table some of the products that we really enjoy. Again, no affiliation, just our experiences. And this is how we deal with our sweet tooth.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Let's start with this. This is probably our most favorite thing, splenda stevia liquid.
Honestly, these things right here that are, if you're watching on YouTube, these squirt sweeteners are all very similar. They're super Sweet. The difference to me is the flavor, the taste of them.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's personal preference. Try the different brands and see which one you like.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And we do use a plenty of it. If we want to sweeten our tea or our coffee or our yogurt, we will put this in there.
But they're all pretty much equal in their nutrition. There's zero calories. This one's made of Stevia and this one is made of monk fruit. The lacanto is made of the monk fruit, but they're all really good, but they just have a different flavor.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: What do you think about these?
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Lily's chocolate. We enjoy the Lily's chocolate. We don't eat a whole lot of it. But during those times that we really do want something sweet and are craving chocolate, we go for the lily's chocolate. And the reason is because the sweetener used with lilies is erythritol. When we're baking, we typically use an erythritol mix, either a pure erythritol or an erythritol stevia mix or an erythritol monk fruit mix. Although it doesn't act exactly like sugar, some of the true bakers don't necessarily think, well, it's not quite right. It doesn't brown exactly right for us. And our baking needs, like if we're making chaffles, is typically a cheesecake. We have keto cheesecake recipes. Chuffles, homemade ice cream. Homemade ice cream.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: On the homemade ice cream, which one do we use?
[00:04:05] Speaker B: The swerve confectioners sweetener.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: I was about to say sugar.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Not sugar at all.
I think it's just all erythritol.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And the alcohols, the swerve, it has a granular confectioners and a brown sugar replacement, basically. And all three of them, to us, give you the same flavor profile as sugar. It may not bake exactly the same, but it does have the same flavor.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Now, on the erythritol with the sugar alcohols, there are conflicting opinions about what it does to inside your gut. And some people will say that it's not healthy, and some people will say, yes, it is, or just use minimally on all of these things. And that just comes down to preference. We understand that everything comes with its pros and cons. Every single substance comes with pros and cons.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Like a lot of the things that we do, especially when it comes to eating, we use a good, better, best approach to the decisions that we make. And as far as sweeteners are concerned, for us, best is don't.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: Yeah, don't use any of them.
We don't have to have sweet things in our life. Sweet is not required to sustain life.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: No, it's a pleasure.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: And we like it.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: When you're looking for that, we step away from best and go to better. Right. And for us, better is Stevia.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: There are studies that show that not only is stevia a naturally occurring zero calorie sweetener, there are studies that show that it doesn't cause an insulin response and in fact, may actually help increase insulin sensitivity, which is the opposite of insulin resistance. It may help your body as far as being sensitive to insulin. So stevia is better. And then if that doesn't work, like, if we can't find Stevia in the manner that we're looking for it, like confectioners, then we go down to good, which is for us one of the naturally occurring sweeteners.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: Monk fruit erythritols.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: Your monk fruit stevia.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: Right.
We do stay away from the artificial sweeteners. Now let's get into real quick, if we can, the artificial versus the natural. What makes them artificial?
[00:06:45] Speaker B: They are made in a lab.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: So what have they taken? Like, give me one. What have they done and what have they done? Taken. And what have they done to it?
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Take sucralose. They took a sugar molecule and they chlorinate it and it changes it.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Stop.
Chlorinated it.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Yeah. They add chlorine.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: They add chlorine.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Yes. And it changes that molecule such that now, although it still looks like a sugar molecule to your body, it can't actually process it like it's sugar.
[00:07:14] Speaker A: It doesn't know what to do with it. Correct.
Why isn't that just poison?
[00:07:21] Speaker B: No, not poison.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: Not poison.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Generally regarded as safe.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Generally recognized.
[00:07:28] Speaker B: Recognized. That's it.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: As safe.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Generally recognized as safe.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Well, that is a label that the FDA uses.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: G-R-A-S. Grass. Grass. However you want to pronounce it is generally recognized as safe according to the FDA. If a company submits a thing to the FDA and the rats didn't die.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: During the company's studies, during the company's own studies, FDA doesn't do any studies.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Then it can be recognized as safe. But they really don't know.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: There are differing levels of research that they do in order to, or when they submit their studies to the FDA. And I think especially on the initial ones, there's typically not a whole lot of human study done when they submit it.
Wow. Yeah.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: It's mind boggling and it's so confusing. So in order to prep for this chat that we're having right now, we sat for several hours yesterday combing through the NIH listed journal studies, and pretty much what we boiled it down to was this is the most confusing and frustrating subject to try to just nail down. Make me a graph. Is this okay or is this okay?
One study will say it's okay, and another study says it's not okay.
It is so confusing. So that's when we have to get down to the good, better, best natural or lab and just narrow it down for ourselves.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it's hard.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: Anyway, so Keto approved. Keto approved.
Some of these things say that on here. What does Keto approved mean?
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Most all of these say Keto approved.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Like the FDA did that.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: No, I don't think so. The best I can tell is it is a label that you put on it that identifies that it does not. Cause it's not high on the glycemic index. Okay, so the glycemic index is an index from zero to 100 of how it raises your blood sugar based on the thing that you just ingested.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: So, pretty much what it's boiling down to is, does that substance have sugar? Is it a carbohydrate? If it does not have the carbohydrates in them, which would raise your blood sugar, insulin, then it can be deemed keto friendly.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Most of them are natural.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Natural is good.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
The ones that we use have the keto friendly label on it. And they are natural.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Yeah. If you're liking this, would you please hit the like button? If you haven't subscribed, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. That would be awesome. As far as the science, then goes, the insulin response to each individual food.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: So this, to me, is where I got the most frustrated, is that you can find glycemic index. And the glycemic response for a lot of foods, probably all of them, I don't know. But what you can't find is the insulin response. And scientifically, they generally just link the two. They say, here's the glycemic index. Thus, your insulin response is, commiserate with that. Glycemic.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: If you've put sugar in your mouth, if you have eaten something that is a carbohydrate or a sugar, you have an insulin response to that. Because the insulin is there. It's a hormone that is there to handle the sugar that is in your bloodstream and get it out of it and into cells.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: Okay, so let's pretend that I don't eat any sugar. Wait, that's real? Yeah, I don't eat any sugar.
What response is my body having if I eat something that is sweet? Because I know my brain is telling me my brain receives. Hey, party up in here.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Yeah. This is where the research gets not just confusing, but conflicting. So there are research papers that say different things. Here's how we act. Here's what we do. Here's why we've chosen the sweeteners that we choose first.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: So frustrating.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: The best research that we can find says that as soon as your mouth tastes sweet, your body starts producing insulin. It has to, whether or not, but whether or not there's sugar involved. So as soon as there's a sweet taste in your mouth, insulin is a hormone, and your body starts. Your pancreas starts producing that hormone. It's starting the digestive process, right? You said party up in here, right?
As soon as you get that sweet, then your body starts producing insulin. Okay, in, say, normal, an apple, a fruit, your body, you taste the sweet, the sugar, then you ingest it. Your body starts to digest. The insulin does what it does with the sugar that you've just eaten. And what the insulin does is the insulin is an escort, basically, and it escorts the sugar molecule into the cells, and the cells will accept those sugar molecules until they're full. So it can go into your liver or your muscles, and it goes in as glucose. The insulin escorts that glucose into the cells until they're full, when the muscles and the liver are full, when they say, no more glucose here.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: And the brain, some of it, some.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: To the brain, then the insulin then escorts it into the fat cells.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Because there's too much.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: You got to put it when there's too much.
That's where your body does with the excess glucose, is it fills up the fat cells. And whereas the muscle and the liver, it says full stop, the fat cells don't. They just accept it. So you're now storing excess energy.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Right?
[00:14:06] Speaker B: So the insulin is basically, the fat cells are in a receive mode whenever there is insulin present.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Okay, so I have now just eaten. Let's just say something with this stevia liquid.
And so maybe my brain said, party up in here, and some insulin comes out.
There's nothing for it to do. My body has to.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Right? So, in that case, you have released the hormone in preparation for sugar, for glucose, and there is none.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: In the case of stevia, your body, as it starts to digest, says there wasn't actually any sugar, and so it shuts off the insulin production.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:14:53] Speaker B: And fairly quickly, the insulin then leaves your bloodstream. Okay, so, in the case of some of the other sweeteners, though, now is where you start to get into some more conflicting research. Some of the other sweeteners, especially the one that I talked about, sucralose. You taste sweet, and your body says sugar, and it starts producing the insulin when it gets into the digestive process. Your body says sugar.
Unlike the stevia. Your body says not sugar with stevia. Okay, so with the sucralose.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: So the molecule to the body is different enough that it recognizes that in stevia, in stevia and in other. Some of the other ones, it recognizes that this is not even close to the right molecule, and we don't use this for energy.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
With the sucralose, though, it's so close to sugar, it's only like, one little tick away from sugar. Your body continues to say sugar, and so it continues to produce the insulin.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: So one part of the body is saying sugar. It's going to produce the insulin, but at the cellular level, it recognizes the fact this isn't sugar. There's nothing I can do with this.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Now I just have insulin.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: So now the insulin can't actually bind to it because it's not sugar. It looks like sugar to your body, but the insulin says, this isn't sugar. I can't actually bind to it. But because your body thinks in the digestive system, the digestive system is saying sugar. And so the insulin continues to be produced.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: And so now you have insulin, basically free, floating around in your bloodstream. And this is when you can get to. When this happens consistently over long periods of time. Now, this leads to insulin resistance.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: What happens there is your cells stop listening to the insulin.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: They've been crying wolf. Too much. Yeah, there's been too much. Hey, we have sugar. We have sugar. We have sugar. And there's not any. There's not any. There's not any. There's insulin. Insulin keeps coming in and not bringing anybody with it.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: That's right. And so then what ends up happening as your body gets insulin resistant, now your pancreas has to start pumping out more and more insulin, like, five to seven times, depending on how resistant you're getting, five to seven times the normal amount of insulin that you would produce. Your body's having to just up the insulin higher and higher and higher until finally it can lead to your pancreas. Just saying, I'm done. I'm out. I can't do this.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Right. I quit, and now we're at type two diabetes.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Among other reasons. But that can be a contributing factor. Right.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: For a ketogenic lifestyle. What I talked about with what the insulin does to the fat cells, right? So especially if you go back to your. Why. Why are you doing a ketogenic liFestyle? And if that, why is weight loss, if there's insulin in your blood, from a weight loss perspective, you're not burning fat, right? The insulin switches the fat cells. It turns them into a receive mode. So anytime there's insulin in your blood, you're not burning fat.
Insulin goes out of your blood. The fat cells say, okay, now we can start giving energy. Now your liver can start using the energy from your fat cells, and it uses that to produce ketones.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Well, the byproduct is the ketone.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: One of the byproducts is ketones, which your body can use as fuel, right? So if your goal is weight loss with your ketogenic lifestyle, then in order to get there the fastest, the bestest, however you want to look at it, most efficient, the most efficient, you would want to keep your insulin as low as possible, right? And although even just tasting sweet is going to cause an insulin response, you want it to go back down to low or none as quickly as possible. And so that's how you can get yourself back into that fat burning mode from a weight loss perspective, for your ketogenic lifestyle, is to get the insulin down, keep it down, and then the lower your insulin stays, the more insulin sensitive you become. And with that, your body is quick to turn off the production of insulin. Your cells are very, very sensitive to, okay, the sugar is gone, the glucose is gone. The reason that we were having insulin is over. Now your body can turn it off. You're sensitive to the insulin. And so the longer you keep your insulin low, the more sensitive your body becomes to it. It's the opposite of insulin resistance.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Cool.
One of the things that I came to, as we were really researching it was your body is really, really cool.
It is doing some amazing stuff when it comes to digestion, and especially with some of these newer sugar alcohols, the studies just aren't there. They haven't done the double blind, randomized, whatever, human studies on these things. And again, from what I can tell, it's fairly difficult to test an insulin response, and that's why they use glycemic index, or your glycemic response for most things. And while important, it also isn't the whole picture, as we talked about with the sucralose.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: Right.
Okay. Well, if you're ready to kick sugar, these are some of the options that you have, and that's what we do.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: And why we do it.
