Ho-kay. I’ve been diving down rabbit holes all over the place this morning as I try to come to some conclusions about these rather weird substances called “sugar alcohols” or “polyols,” with the most commonly used ones being sorbitol, xylitol, and erythritol. Can you just buy a bag of a powdered polyol and put it in the place of sugar in your pantry and your food? Is that change going to make you into the person of your dreams? Well, sigh, as is so often the case, the answer is no.
I guess I ought to start out with a definition. Sort of like the “Holy Roman Empire” being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, sugar alcohols are neither sugar nor alcohol. Let me quote here:
Sugar alcohols are neither sugars nor alcohols. They are carbohydrates with a chemical structure that partially resembles sugar and partially resembles alcohol, but they don’t contain ethanol as alcoholic beverages do. They are incompletely absorbed and metabolized by the body, and consequently contribute fewer calories than most sugars. (“Sugar Alcohols Fact Sheet”)
Now, I must confess that I’m sort of prejudiced against these sweeteners, as I once ate a whole roll of chocolate Velamints which contained one of them (I thought xylitol, but the ones online are sweetened with sorbitol). I love that crunch that comes with the first bite! (That’s why I was so fond of M&M’s—it certainly wasn’t the quality of the chocolate, but the initial crunch, that lured me in.) Anyway, I kept eating them, assuring myself that after all they didn’t have any calories (which isn’t true—“sugar free” does not mean “calorie free”) until I’d consumed all of them. I paid a digestive price for my overindulgence, though. Without going into the gory details, I’ll just say that I was kind of a sick little puppy for the rest of the afternoon.
So here’s the scoop on these non-sugar sweeteners:
- These substances are not as sweet as sucrose, or table sugar, so in order to get the same sweetening effect you have to use more of it than you would of the regular stuff, with the (possible) exception of xylitol, which at least one source shows as having 100% of the sweetening power of sugar. (Estimates of the sweetening power vary somewhat.)
- The main cause of their lower caloric count is that they are “incompletely digested,” passing out of the body through the digestive tract. It’s this factor that causes the digestive upsets, as the undigested remnants are fermented by the bacteria in the large intestine, leading to gas, bloating, and diarrhea. Anybody remember the infamous Olestra, the non-fat fat that was going to lead all of us into the promised land of slimness and health? It had the same general characteristic as the polyols in that the body didn’t “recognize” it and so just passed it along. Well, it caused too many problems for continued popularity, although the FDA has never withdrawn its safety certification. (TIME Magazine listed it as one of its “50 worst inventions” for 2010.) Not only did it cause digestive problems, but it also interfered with the absorption of fat-soluble nutrients.
- The polyol that causes the least upset is erythritol, which is about 70% as sweet as sugar with a very low caloric absorption. It’s somewhat different from the other polyols since most of it goes directly into the bloodstream from the small intestine, where it circulates for awhile and is then excreted by the kidneys, basically unchanged. The remaining percentage passes into the large intestine, but it doesn’t seem to undergo the same fermentation process as the other polyols and so doesn’t cause the same problems. It’s fair to point out that the kidneys have to filter it out of the blood in order for it to be excreted in the urine, so they’re being tasked with additional work.
- At least some of the digestion of the polyols takes place in the liver, yet another organ we don’t want to overtax:
Moderate doses of least xylitol and sorbitol are almost totally absorbed and metabolized, chiefly in the liver cells, thereby eventually contributing to the formation of glucose and liver glycogen. (“Effect of long-term, peroral administration of sugar alcohols on man.”) [“peroral” simply means “by mouth”; I haven’t been able to find out why the label “least” is added here. In spite of the strange terminology I wanted to include this quotation because it’s from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Institutes of Health, so a site with real scientific chops.)
- Some people can have an extreme reaction to even small amounts of these substances, in particular xylitol. Here’s what happened to a woman who calls herself “Crunchy Betty” after she used just one packet of xylitol in her coffee:
To save you the gory details, let me just give you a few key concepts and you can put it all together:
half a cup of coffee
crippling stomach cramps
an hour in the bathroom
severe dehydration
post traumatic sweetener disorder
It wasn’t until later that I noticed a warning, tucked right at the very end of the paragraphs talking about how healthful and natural xylitol is, that said: “Excessive use of Xylitol may cause a mild laxative effect.” I nominate this the understatement of my life. (Read the whole article, I beg you: “Xylitol: Should We Stop Calling It Natural?”)
What’s the bottom line here? Hey, if you want to buy powdered xylitol or erythritol on Amazon, go ahead. It’s a free country. (You’ll note that I’m not linking to anything here.) It’s probably no big deal, unless you have a reaction like Crunchy Betty’s, to use a teaspoon of the stuff in your coffee. But you’re still ingesting substances that your body has to deal with in one way or another, and, more importantly for my purposes here, you’re still feeding your sweet tooth.
Also, you’re not eating something that’s inherently good for you. Betty quotes from a site called “Natural News” to tell us this nugget of sobering information:
Xylitol is a processed sugar. After being hydrogenated and having toxic chemicals added to xylan from corn or other plant material, and then removed, you get xylitol. (original article is titled “Xylitol—Is It Safe or Effective?”)
Whew!
So for the bottom bottom line I’ll just say this:
There is no magic bullet when it comes to healthy eating,
Everybody got that? Good. See ya later!