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Originally Posted by CityGirl8
This article is so well intentioned. But then...well, bless her heart for trying anyway. It's a step in the right direction.
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I remember the years (decades?) of falling for the deception that honey and maple syrup were better for you than sugar, because they had small amounts of other nutrients in them. And fruit -well, there's all those vitamins and all that fiber in those. Of course the fructose in the fruit was considered harmless, because it didn't raise blood sugar, and high fructose corn syrup was better for you than sugar for the same reason.
My excuse is that I fell for all that back before the internet - it was difficult to even find more than very vague information about what nutrients were in various foods, much less to be able to put those nutrients in any kind of perspective to the total amount of sugar in them.
As far as fructose and HFCS are concerned - I don't know when it first came to light that it could cause NAFL problems, but even if THEY happened to have an inkling back in the 80's about all the problems it would cause, that information sure hadn't trickled down to the general populace.
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I don't know if the article quoted above was the entire article or not - all but the first few sentences are hidden, unless you pay to register to read the rest of it.
But I wonder why Stevia was included in the list of sugars. If the list had been called natural sweeteners, I could see it included there, but the way it's written, it makes it sound as if even though it's a zero calorie sweetener, it's still just as bad for you as all the others they listed. (aside from the sweet taste of it - but to me the taste of stevia is quite different from the taste of sugars, so to me that's not even a reason to include it in that list):
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Stevia Extracted from the leaves of the Paraguayan stevia plant, this zero calorie, natural sugar substitute has been seized upon by the food and beverages industry – it’s been added to Sprite for several years, lowering the drink’s sugar content by 30 per cent and San Peligrino's flavoured drinks are now made with stevia too. Other drinks-makers have used sweeteners such as aspertame – found in Coke Zero Sugar.
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Sure, if you ate a teaspoon of stevia, it would have about the same amount of carbs/sugar as a teaspoon of the other sweeteners. But the sweetening power of an entire teaspoon of straight stevia would make it impossible to gag down, unless you were eating... oh I don't know, maybe a quadruple big batch of cookies sweetened only with stevia, since such a tiny bit of it goes such a long way.