Erythritol, Xylitol, Stevia and so on. To be honest, I don’t even know all the alternative sweeteners on the market right now. Not even half of them, I think. When I first stopped eating sugar, I wanted my liver to heal as quickly as possible. That meant avoiding insulin spikes.
As soon as you eat something sweet, the insulin level rises. A lot less with artificial sweeteners, yes. But it still goes up. So for the first three months I didn’t use any artificial sweeteners. I have tried erythritol since and it’s not for me. Why? For two reasons.
I don’t like the taste
By the time I tried erythritol I hadn’t eaten sugar for months. My body had changed and my taste-buds reset. The artificial sweetener was simply too sweet for me. And it tastes artificial, like eating a gum drop. That’s just not a good flavour for me anymore.
It’s the same with honey, by the way. Also too sweet for me these days. I haven’t even considered trying maple syrup either because that was too sweet even when I still ate sugar.
They are artificial
Then there’s the fact that artificial sweeteners fall into the category of processed foods which I avoid. Like other processed foods, they might have side effects but because the sweeteners are still comparatively new, nobody seems to know what exactly they do to our bodies. I don’t want to find out the hard way.
I’ve known for years that alcohol based sweeteners do not agree with my digestion and even though erythritol didn’t seem to have any side effects as far as I could tell, I still prefer to just replace it with bananas.
If you like the taste of artificial sweeteners, by all means, go for it. You won’t find them in my recipes but since I often adapt Keto recipes you can look up the amounts and types of sweeteners by clicking on the “Original Recipe” link at the top of each recipe page.
