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Low Carb Sweetener Rundown
A reader wrote me after I sent out the cookie recipes, wanting to know what stevia is, and I figured some other folks might not know. Also, there is a new player in the low carb sweetener arena. Accordingly, this seemed like a good time for a quick rundown of the various low carb sweeteners.
* Splenda - Currently the sweetener of choice around here. Splenda, approved by the FDA just a couple of years back, hit US grocery stores in 2000 or so. Splenda is the trade name, the substance that makes it sweet is called sucralose. Sucralose is actually made from sugar, by chemically patching in another chlorine molecule. For some reason that I don't pretend to understand, this has two effects: It prevents your body from recognizing sucralose as food, so that, at least for the very most part, you don't digest or absorb the stuff, and it makes sucralose much, much sweeter than the sugar from which it is made.
In order to make Splenda measure like sugar (a property which greatly simplifies adapting recipes), the manufacturer "bulks" sucralose with maltodextrin. Maltodextrin is, indeed, a carbohydrate, and a rather high-impact carbohydrate, at that. However, even with the maltodextrin added, Splenda still has only 1/8 the quantity of carbohydrate that sugar does - a half a gram per teaspoon, versus 4 grams.
Still, in recipes which call for a lot of Splenda, those carbs can add up - a cup of Splenda contains 24 grams of carbohydrate. For this reason, many of us are waiting anxiously for liquid Splenda to become available. Liquid Splenda will not have carbohydrates added, and will, therefore, be carb free. It seems to be taking remarkably long to hit the market, but it is indeed in the works. Watch this 'zine for notification when we find it's available!
Splenda tastes remarkably good - I find it really does taste like sugar, with no bitter aftertaste or strange chemical flavor. Splenda also stands up to heat, and therefore can be used in baking, or in anything that is going to be cooked, even if it will be heated for a long time - for instance, I've used Splenda to make "looing" sauce, a Chinese sauce for stewing meats that usually contains sugar. Even after cooking all day in a crockpot, the sauce tasted great.
The drawbacks of Splenda are that it does not provide any of the textural effects that sugar does - it does not caramelize, cause browning, or make foods moist or chewy the way that sugar does. Still, it's a vast step forward in the world of artificial sweeteners.Splenda also does not give the same volume as sugar, so the yield on cookie recipes and the like will be slightly less than with sugar. One final drawback is that since it is still under patent, Splenda is pretty pricey. Worth it, in my book, but still, not cheap - I pay between $4-$5 for a box that is the sweetening equivalent of 2 lbs. of sugar.
I've had readers inquire about possible health effects of Splenda, in particular about thymus gland shrinkage and kidney swelling. I looked at the FDA papers regarding the animal tests on Splenda, and it is absolutely true that sucralose caused these effects in lab animals - in quantities that are equivalent to a 150 lb. human being eating 17,586 teaspoonfuls of Splenda a day. In doses that equal a 150 lb. person eating 8,793 teaspoonfuls of Splenda a day - still a ridiculously large dose - no ill effect was noted. Since the average American is eating 45 teaspoonfuls of sugar a day, it's hard to see how even your most enthusiastic Splenda user would consume more than 100 teaspoonfuls a day or so (which, by the way, would contain 50 grams of carb, so you shouldn't do it). So I wouldn't sweat it. After all, eating those 45 teaspoonfuls of sugar a day is killing people through heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. It's important to keep these things in perspective.
* Saccharine - Best known under the trade name Sweet 'n' Low, saccharine is the granddaddy of artificial sweeteners. It's mostly used to sweeten beverages, and rarely used in home baking and the like. This is largely because saccharine has a bitter, chemical flavor if used in any quantity - at least to many people. It turns out that the ability to sense a bitter aftertaste from saccharine is genetically mediated - some people taste it, and some people don't. If saccharine tastes okay to you, you may as well use it in your coffee, tea, or iced tea - I also sometimes use it to sweeten yogurt. It's quite inexpensive. By the way, if you're going to keep saccharine around the house, it's good to know that, like Splenda, the powder form of saccharine is bulked with maltodextrin, and so contains at least a trace quantity of carbohydrate, whereas the liquid in the dropper bottle is carb-free.
Oh, there is also a "brown sugar" version of Sweet 'n' Low available. Save your money. Tastes nothing like brown sugar. Your best bet for a good, brown sugar flavor is to combine Splenda with a small amount of dark molasses.
You should know that the FDA has removed saccharine from the list of carcinogenic substances; if you find a package that still has a cancer warning on it, it's old. Use saccharine without fear.
* Aspartame - Best known as Equal, aspartame quickly took over the artificial sweetener market when it was introduced in the 1980s, but I confess I never could figure out why. I didn't like the taste of, say, aspartame sweetened soda as well as I did the saccharine sweetened stuff. Further, you can count me among the folks who feel that consuming a large quantity of aspartame makes us feel weird in one way or another, although minor quantities don't bother me. Doc Atkins claims that aspartame interferes with fat burning on a cellular level; I don't have the expertise to evaluate this claim. I do know that the FDA has had more complaints about aspartame than about any other food substance in its history.
A major drawback of aspartame is that it breaks down if it is heated for any length of time - you can use it to sweeten your coffee, but if you put that coffee in a Thermos and keep it warm for a while, it won't be sweet. And aspartame sweetened soda breaks down and loses its sweetness over time, as well. This means, of course, that aspartame is not a useful sweetener for cooking with. If you like it in your coffee or soda, it is inexpensive now that there are generics out there, but that's about all it's good for, if you ask me. Many of the packaged products - sodas, pudding mixes, gelatin mixes, etc - that have been sweetened with aspartame for the past 20 years are switching over to sucralose.
* Acesulfame-K - Also known as ace-K, or sometimes by the trade name Sunnette, acesulfame-K has never really caught on. Oh, you see it around, and in a few products here and there, but it's certainly not in really wide use. I've tried it, it tastes okay, but I prefer Splenda. It's cheaper than Splenda, though, if you're on a budget and don't like saccharine. Because of my limited experience with it, I can't really tell you much more about it.
* Stevia - Stevia is half of the Latin name of a South American shrub, Stevia rebaudiana. Known in its native land as "sweet leaf", the leaves of the stevia shrub have been used by the native people of South America as a sweetener for centuries. More recent is stevia extract, a white powder that is fiercely sweet - several hundred times sweeter than sugar. While the leaves of the stevia shrub no doubt contain at least a tiny amount of carb, in the quantities needed to make foods sweet, stevia contributes no carbohydrate to your diet.
Stevia does have the advantage - if you consider it an advantage - of being an all natural product. Personally, I'm not terribly impressed by the word "natural". Sugar is natural, and it's deadly. Tobacco is natural. So is cocaine. Rattlesnake venom. Death angel mushroom. None of which is meant to imply that stevia is dangerous - on the contrary, I've heard of no ill effects associated with stevia at all. So far as I can determine, stevia is totally, utterly safe. I'm just not convinced that it's hugely, wildly better for my health than artificial sweeteners, that's all.
In Japan, I hear, stevia is widely used to sweeten the same stuff we put aspartame in here - sugar free soda and processed foods. In the US, the FDA has finally - after a whole lot of stonewalling - made it legal to sell stevia, but not as a food product. The folks who sell it have to call it a "food supplement" instead. As a result, very few packaged products sweetened with stevia are available in the US (although I do get an excellent stevia-sweetened vanilla whey protein powder, under the name "Show Me The Whey".) However, if you want to use stevia as a sweetener at home, it's now available in most health food stores.
There are, however, some problems with using stevia; those problems are worst with the actual cut stevia leaf, less with the white powder, but generally apply to all forms of stevia. First of all, stevia is so sweet, that adjusting recipes becomes a hit-or-miss sort of a deal, and it's easy to get too much. Many people who use the white extract powder make it a little easier by mixing a standard solution - usually 2 tablespoons of water to one teaspoon of stevia powder - and putting it in a dropper bottle. I've read that mixed this way, one drop of the liquid is the rough equivalent of a teaspoon of sugar.
However, even diluted this way, stevia isn't the easiest sweetener to use, because it has some aftertastes. The straight stevia leaf has a flavor to it that is reminiscent of licorice, and the extract often has a bitter flavor if used in any quantity. I have found that stevia works far better in some things than in others. For instance, I like it okay in protein shakes, but I tried making a chocolate cheesecake with stevia, and it was so bitter it was inedible - it went straight into the trash.
If you're wary of artificial sweeteners, stevia is definitely worth checking out, but you'll probably need to experiment to work out recipes. It's a good idea to buy a cookbook of recipes specifically for stevia. Here are links to a couple:
The Stevia Cookbook: Cooking With Nature's Calorie Free Sweetener:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0895299267/lowcarbohysoluti
Stevia Sweet Recipes: Sugar Free Naturally
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1890612138/lowcarbohysoluti
* Fructooligosaccharides: Don't bother trying to pronounce that word; just say "FOS". FOS is, indeed, a form of sugar. It occurs naturally in small quantities in a wide variety of plant foods, from garlic to bananas to artichokes. But FOS is interesting because it fills the same niche in the sugar world that fiber does in the starch world, which is to say that it's a sugar that is so big that your gut can neither digest nor absorb it, making it an okay choice for low carbers.
But it gets better - because the healthy bacteria in your gut - the acidophilus and bifidus bacteria - can eat FOS, so getting some FOS in your diet will actually improve your health. Furthermore FOS has a nice, naturally sweet taste, and will hold moisture in foods the way that sugar does.
So why haven't you heard of it yet? Well, ignoring the fact that since it's a natural, unpatented product no big corporation has a huge financial stake in selling it to you, there are also a couple of drawbacks to FOS. First of all, it's expensive. I mean, really expensive. I spent $12 on 2 ounces of the stuff when I bought it straight. I don't know a whole lot of folks who can afford to use something that steep in any quantity.
Secondly, FOS is only half as sweet as table sugar. You'd think you could simply double the quantity, but along with the question of price, there's also the little matter that eating a large quantity of FOS will do to your gut exactly the same thing that eating large quantities of any indigestible carbohydrate will do to your gut - cause gas and diarrhea.
So while FOS has some useful properties for us, it is not going to become the day-to-day sweetener of choice.
* Stevia/FOS blend - Some genius worked this one out! Since stevia is way too sweet, and FOS isn't sweet enough, you can now buy the two of them blended together. This combo is still sweeter than sugar, but it's a whole lot easier to use than straight stevia extract, and tastes better besides - the FOS mellows the "edge" on the stevia flavor. If having a natural sweetener is important to you, this is the sweetener of choice.
I particularly like the blend for sweetening plain yogurt. I buy stevia/FOS blend under the name SweetLeaf, which comes both in shaker, or in paper packets. Unless you're planning to carry it in your purse or pocket, I recommend the shaker. Not only is it cheaper, but it keeps better. You see, FOS is powerfully hygroscopic, which is to say it attracts water. As a result, the stuff in the paper packets tends to cake after a while, and once it's caked, it's very, very difficult to dissolve. If you buy the packets, and aren't going to use them up quite rapidly, I'd recommend keeping them in an airtight container.
A few of my recipes call for this stevia/FOS blend, since I've had requests for stevia recipes from readers. Also, some of the stevia cookbooks include recipes for this blend.
* Polyols - Also known as sugar alcohols, you'll find these listed on product labels as maltitol, lactitol, sorbitol, xylitol, etc. If the name of the sweetener ends in "tol", figure it's one of these. Polyols are carbohydrates, but again, they're very long chain carbohydrates which are hard for you to digest and absorb, so they cause little-to-no blood sugar elevation or insulin release. There is some evidence that different folks' bodies deal with these differently; if you get a blood sugar crash or are hungry an hour or so after eating something sweetened with polyols, you may be digesting more of them than most people do.
Polyols are the sweetener of choice in a wide variety of low carb and sugar free specialty products for the simple reason that they taste good, and will give all of the textural effects that sugar does - they'll make a brownie chewy and fudgy, make brittle toffee, gooey marshmallows, etc. However, it is important to limit how much you eat of products made with polyols. As mentioned above, carbohydrates that you don't digest and absorb will cause gas and, in larger amounts, diarrhea. Half a sugar free chocolate bar is enough to make me socially offensive several hours later - I wouldn't eat one if I had an important meeting later in the day - and a dozen sugar free taffies were enough to cause my husband a half an hour of considerable pain on our low carb cruise last year.
Personally, I really appreciate this quality of polyols. Why? Because they give us sweets of truly excellent quality that absolutely enforce moderation. To my mind, that's a beautiful thing.
A couple of good things to know about polyols: While these are, indeed, carbohydrates, because they are not, for the most part, digested and absorbed, low carb specialty food manufacturers generally subtract them from the carb counts of their foods - this accounts for some of the accusations of low carb products having far higher carb counts than listed on the label. I don't really have a problem with the practice, but it's good to know that companies that make sugar free candies for diabetics generally use polyols, but list their carb counts. This makes it appear that these candies are far higher in carbs than the products aimed at the low carb market, which is not the case. For instance, most of the big name candy chains - Fannie May, South Bend Chocolate Company, etc - have some sugar free candies made with polyols. Although they are not listed as low carb, there is no reason not to eat these instead of low carb specialty brands.
Also, a cautionary note: A friend of mine started taking Beano with her low carb candy, so it wouldn't cause gas. It worked, but it apparently worked as it does with beans, by making those indigestible carbs digestible. My friend started to gain weight. There's no getting around the in-built moderation enforcement of polyols - and again, I think that's a good thing. These should be an occasional treat, not the focus of your diet.
Polyol sweetened products are, for the most part, truly superb in quality. I can't tell the difference between high quality sugar free chocolate - Ross, Carbolite, Pure De-Lite, Darrell Lea, and the like - and the sugary variety. However, so far as I have been able to determine, polyols are not available for home use.
* Kiwi Sweetener - This is the new kid on the block, and I haven't tried it yet. Being marketed as "Ki-Sweet" and "Trutina Dulcem," this sweetener is apparently a very low impact sugar derived from kiwi fruit. I find this interesting, in light of the fact that kiwi fruits themselves have a fairly high glycemic index for a fruit - but that does not mean that they don't contain a low impact sugar. All I have been able to gather about this sweetener so far is that it is about 15 times as sweet as sugar, that it is, indeed, a sugar itself, but apparently one that doesn't derange blood sugar much, or cause much insulin release, and that apparently it will, like the polyols, give most of the textural effects of sugar - moisture, caramelization, all of that. The folks who sell Trutina Dulcem also claim that it has a thermogenic effect; I have seen no other information on this.
Oh, I've learned one more thing - so far, it's hard to get, and expensive. One website I found where you could actually order the stuff wanted $18.95 for 3.5 ounces, another wanted $12.50 for 100 grams, and would only take orders of 3 containers or more. Still, the stuff sounds promising, and I may well cough up the bucks to try it sometime soon. If I do, I'll report back to you, of course.
* Lo Han Sweetener - This is a sweetener derived from a Chinese fruit, and it sounds a lot like stevia - extremely sweet, and occasionally bitter. Interestingly, the Lo Han fruit is apparently known as "the longevity fruit," and is a traditional Chinese remedy for coughs and chest congestion; it is also used as an analgesic.
* SommerSweet - I've heard Suzanne Sommers talk about her new sweetener on television, but darned if I can find any info as to what is actually in it, and it's not on the market yet, so far as I can tell, so I have no idea what it will cost. On the Rosie O'Donnell Show, Suzanne was saying that SommerSweet gives all the textural effects of sugar, so I'm wondering if this is her brand of the kiwi sweetener?
Written by Dana Carpenter
for the Lowcarbazines January 2002 magazine
Low Carb Sweetener Rundown
A reader wrote me after I sent out the cookie recipes, wanting to know what stevia is, and I figured some other folks might not know. Also, there is a new player in the low carb sweetener arena. Accordingly, this seemed like a good time for a quick rundown of the various low carb sweeteners.
* Splenda - Currently the sweetener of choice around here. Splenda, approved by the FDA just a couple of years back, hit US grocery stores in 2000 or so. Splenda is the trade name, the substance that makes it sweet is called sucralose. Sucralose is actually made from sugar, by chemically patching in another chlorine molecule. For some reason that I don't pretend to understand, this has two effects: It prevents your body from recognizing sucralose as food, so that, at least for the very most part, you don't digest or absorb the stuff, and it makes sucralose much, much sweeter than the sugar from which it is made.
In order to make Splenda measure like sugar (a property which greatly simplifies adapting recipes), the manufacturer "bulks" sucralose with maltodextrin. Maltodextrin is, indeed, a carbohydrate, and a rather high-impact carbohydrate, at that. However, even with the maltodextrin added, Splenda still has only 1/8 the quantity of carbohydrate that sugar does - a half a gram per teaspoon, versus 4 grams.
Still, in recipes which call for a lot of Splenda, those carbs can add up - a cup of Splenda contains 24 grams of carbohydrate. For this reason, many of us are waiting anxiously for liquid Splenda to become available. Liquid Splenda will not have carbohydrates added, and will, therefore, be carb free. It seems to be taking remarkably long to hit the market, but it is indeed in the works. Watch this 'zine for notification when we find it's available!
Splenda tastes remarkably good - I find it really does taste like sugar, with no bitter aftertaste or strange chemical flavor. Splenda also stands up to heat, and therefore can be used in baking, or in anything that is going to be cooked, even if it will be heated for a long time - for instance, I've used Splenda to make "looing" sauce, a Chinese sauce for stewing meats that usually contains sugar. Even after cooking all day in a crockpot, the sauce tasted great.
The drawbacks of Splenda are that it does not provide any of the textural effects that sugar does - it does not caramelize, cause browning, or make foods moist or chewy the way that sugar does. Still, it's a vast step forward in the world of artificial sweeteners.Splenda also does not give the same volume as sugar, so the yield on cookie recipes and the like will be slightly less than with sugar. One final drawback is that since it is still under patent, Splenda is pretty pricey. Worth it, in my book, but still, not cheap - I pay between $4-$5 for a box that is the sweetening equivalent of 2 lbs. of sugar.
I've had readers inquire about possible health effects of Splenda, in particular about thymus gland shrinkage and kidney swelling. I looked at the FDA papers regarding the animal tests on Splenda, and it is absolutely true that sucralose caused these effects in lab animals - in quantities that are equivalent to a 150 lb. human being eating 17,586 teaspoonfuls of Splenda a day. In doses that equal a 150 lb. person eating 8,793 teaspoonfuls of Splenda a day - still a ridiculously large dose - no ill effect was noted. Since the average American is eating 45 teaspoonfuls of sugar a day, it's hard to see how even your most enthusiastic Splenda user would consume more than 100 teaspoonfuls a day or so (which, by the way, would contain 50 grams of carb, so you shouldn't do it). So I wouldn't sweat it. After all, eating those 45 teaspoonfuls of sugar a day is killing people through heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. It's important to keep these things in perspective.
* Saccharine - Best known under the trade name Sweet 'n' Low, saccharine is the granddaddy of artificial sweeteners. It's mostly used to sweeten beverages, and rarely used in home baking and the like. This is largely because saccharine has a bitter, chemical flavor if used in any quantity - at least to many people. It turns out that the ability to sense a bitter aftertaste from saccharine is genetically mediated - some people taste it, and some people don't. If saccharine tastes okay to you, you may as well use it in your coffee, tea, or iced tea - I also sometimes use it to sweeten yogurt. It's quite inexpensive. By the way, if you're going to keep saccharine around the house, it's good to know that, like Splenda, the powder form of saccharine is bulked with maltodextrin, and so contains at least a trace quantity of carbohydrate, whereas the liquid in the dropper bottle is carb-free.
Oh, there is also a "brown sugar" version of Sweet 'n' Low available. Save your money. Tastes nothing like brown sugar. Your best bet for a good, brown sugar flavor is to combine Splenda with a small amount of dark molasses.
You should know that the FDA has removed saccharine from the list of carcinogenic substances; if you find a package that still has a cancer warning on it, it's old. Use saccharine without fear.
* Aspartame - Best known as Equal, aspartame quickly took over the artificial sweetener market when it was introduced in the 1980s, but I confess I never could figure out why. I didn't like the taste of, say, aspartame sweetened soda as well as I did the saccharine sweetened stuff. Further, you can count me among the folks who feel that consuming a large quantity of aspartame makes us feel weird in one way or another, although minor quantities don't bother me. Doc Atkins claims that aspartame interferes with fat burning on a cellular level; I don't have the expertise to evaluate this claim. I do know that the FDA has had more complaints about aspartame than about any other food substance in its history.
A major drawback of aspartame is that it breaks down if it is heated for any length of time - you can use it to sweeten your coffee, but if you put that coffee in a Thermos and keep it warm for a while, it won't be sweet. And aspartame sweetened soda breaks down and loses its sweetness over time, as well. This means, of course, that aspartame is not a useful sweetener for cooking with. If you like it in your coffee or soda, it is inexpensive now that there are generics out there, but that's about all it's good for, if you ask me. Many of the packaged products - sodas, pudding mixes, gelatin mixes, etc - that have been sweetened with aspartame for the past 20 years are switching over to sucralose.
* Acesulfame-K - Also known as ace-K, or sometimes by the trade name Sunnette, acesulfame-K has never really caught on. Oh, you see it around, and in a few products here and there, but it's certainly not in really wide use. I've tried it, it tastes okay, but I prefer Splenda. It's cheaper than Splenda, though, if you're on a budget and don't like saccharine. Because of my limited experience with it, I can't really tell you much more about it.
* Stevia - Stevia is half of the Latin name of a South American shrub, Stevia rebaudiana. Known in its native land as "sweet leaf", the leaves of the stevia shrub have been used by the native people of South America as a sweetener for centuries. More recent is stevia extract, a white powder that is fiercely sweet - several hundred times sweeter than sugar. While the leaves of the stevia shrub no doubt contain at least a tiny amount of carb, in the quantities needed to make foods sweet, stevia contributes no carbohydrate to your diet.
Stevia does have the advantage - if you consider it an advantage - of being an all natural product. Personally, I'm not terribly impressed by the word "natural". Sugar is natural, and it's deadly. Tobacco is natural. So is cocaine. Rattlesnake venom. Death angel mushroom. None of which is meant to imply that stevia is dangerous - on the contrary, I've heard of no ill effects associated with stevia at all. So far as I can determine, stevia is totally, utterly safe. I'm just not convinced that it's hugely, wildly better for my health than artificial sweeteners, that's all.
In Japan, I hear, stevia is widely used to sweeten the same stuff we put aspartame in here - sugar free soda and processed foods. In the US, the FDA has finally - after a whole lot of stonewalling - made it legal to sell stevia, but not as a food product. The folks who sell it have to call it a "food supplement" instead. As a result, very few packaged products sweetened with stevia are available in the US (although I do get an excellent stevia-sweetened vanilla whey protein powder, under the name "Show Me The Whey".) However, if you want to use stevia as a sweetener at home, it's now available in most health food stores.
There are, however, some problems with using stevia; those problems are worst with the actual cut stevia leaf, less with the white powder, but generally apply to all forms of stevia. First of all, stevia is so sweet, that adjusting recipes becomes a hit-or-miss sort of a deal, and it's easy to get too much. Many people who use the white extract powder make it a little easier by mixing a standard solution - usually 2 tablespoons of water to one teaspoon of stevia powder - and putting it in a dropper bottle. I've read that mixed this way, one drop of the liquid is the rough equivalent of a teaspoon of sugar.
However, even diluted this way, stevia isn't the easiest sweetener to use, because it has some aftertastes. The straight stevia leaf has a flavor to it that is reminiscent of licorice, and the extract often has a bitter flavor if used in any quantity. I have found that stevia works far better in some things than in others. For instance, I like it okay in protein shakes, but I tried making a chocolate cheesecake with stevia, and it was so bitter it was inedible - it went straight into the trash.
If you're wary of artificial sweeteners, stevia is definitely worth checking out, but you'll probably need to experiment to work out recipes. It's a good idea to buy a cookbook of recipes specifically for stevia. Here are links to a couple:
The Stevia Cookbook: Cooking With Nature's Calorie Free Sweetener:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0895299267/lowcarbohysoluti
Stevia Sweet Recipes: Sugar Free Naturally
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1890612138/lowcarbohysoluti
* Fructooligosaccharides: Don't bother trying to pronounce that word; just say "FOS". FOS is, indeed, a form of sugar. It occurs naturally in small quantities in a wide variety of plant foods, from garlic to bananas to artichokes. But FOS is interesting because it fills the same niche in the sugar world that fiber does in the starch world, which is to say that it's a sugar that is so big that your gut can neither digest nor absorb it, making it an okay choice for low carbers.
But it gets better - because the healthy bacteria in your gut - the acidophilus and bifidus bacteria - can eat FOS, so getting some FOS in your diet will actually improve your health. Furthermore FOS has a nice, naturally sweet taste, and will hold moisture in foods the way that sugar does.
So why haven't you heard of it yet? Well, ignoring the fact that since it's a natural, unpatented product no big corporation has a huge financial stake in selling it to you, there are also a couple of drawbacks to FOS. First of all, it's expensive. I mean, really expensive. I spent $12 on 2 ounces of the stuff when I bought it straight. I don't know a whole lot of folks who can afford to use something that steep in any quantity.
Secondly, FOS is only half as sweet as table sugar. You'd think you could simply double the quantity, but along with the question of price, there's also the little matter that eating a large quantity of FOS will do to your gut exactly the same thing that eating large quantities of any indigestible carbohydrate will do to your gut - cause gas and diarrhea.
So while FOS has some useful properties for us, it is not going to become the day-to-day sweetener of choice.
* Stevia/FOS blend - Some genius worked this one out! Since stevia is way too sweet, and FOS isn't sweet enough, you can now buy the two of them blended together. This combo is still sweeter than sugar, but it's a whole lot easier to use than straight stevia extract, and tastes better besides - the FOS mellows the "edge" on the stevia flavor. If having a natural sweetener is important to you, this is the sweetener of choice.
I particularly like the blend for sweetening plain yogurt. I buy stevia/FOS blend under the name SweetLeaf, which comes both in shaker, or in paper packets. Unless you're planning to carry it in your purse or pocket, I recommend the shaker. Not only is it cheaper, but it keeps better. You see, FOS is powerfully hygroscopic, which is to say it attracts water. As a result, the stuff in the paper packets tends to cake after a while, and once it's caked, it's very, very difficult to dissolve. If you buy the packets, and aren't going to use them up quite rapidly, I'd recommend keeping them in an airtight container.
A few of my recipes call for this stevia/FOS blend, since I've had requests for stevia recipes from readers. Also, some of the stevia cookbooks include recipes for this blend.
* Polyols - Also known as sugar alcohols, you'll find these listed on product labels as maltitol, lactitol, sorbitol, xylitol, etc. If the name of the sweetener ends in "tol", figure it's one of these. Polyols are carbohydrates, but again, they're very long chain carbohydrates which are hard for you to digest and absorb, so they cause little-to-no blood sugar elevation or insulin release. There is some evidence that different folks' bodies deal with these differently; if you get a blood sugar crash or are hungry an hour or so after eating something sweetened with polyols, you may be digesting more of them than most people do.
Polyols are the sweetener of choice in a wide variety of low carb and sugar free specialty products for the simple reason that they taste good, and will give all of the textural effects that sugar does - they'll make a brownie chewy and fudgy, make brittle toffee, gooey marshmallows, etc. However, it is important to limit how much you eat of products made with polyols. As mentioned above, carbohydrates that you don't digest and absorb will cause gas and, in larger amounts, diarrhea. Half a sugar free chocolate bar is enough to make me socially offensive several hours later - I wouldn't eat one if I had an important meeting later in the day - and a dozen sugar free taffies were enough to cause my husband a half an hour of considerable pain on our low carb cruise last year.
Personally, I really appreciate this quality of polyols. Why? Because they give us sweets of truly excellent quality that absolutely enforce moderation. To my mind, that's a beautiful thing.
A couple of good things to know about polyols: While these are, indeed, carbohydrates, because they are not, for the most part, digested and absorbed, low carb specialty food manufacturers generally subtract them from the carb counts of their foods - this accounts for some of the accusations of low carb products having far higher carb counts than listed on the label. I don't really have a problem with the practice, but it's good to know that companies that make sugar free candies for diabetics generally use polyols, but list their carb counts. This makes it appear that these candies are far higher in carbs than the products aimed at the low carb market, which is not the case. For instance, most of the big name candy chains - Fannie May, South Bend Chocolate Company, etc - have some sugar free candies made with polyols. Although they are not listed as low carb, there is no reason not to eat these instead of low carb specialty brands.
Also, a cautionary note: A friend of mine started taking Beano with her low carb candy, so it wouldn't cause gas. It worked, but it apparently worked as it does with beans, by making those indigestible carbs digestible. My friend started to gain weight. There's no getting around the in-built moderation enforcement of polyols - and again, I think that's a good thing. These should be an occasional treat, not the focus of your diet.
Polyol sweetened products are, for the most part, truly superb in quality. I can't tell the difference between high quality sugar free chocolate - Ross, Carbolite, Pure De-Lite, Darrell Lea, and the like - and the sugary variety. However, so far as I have been able to determine, polyols are not available for home use.
* Kiwi Sweetener - This is the new kid on the block, and I haven't tried it yet. Being marketed as "Ki-Sweet" and "Trutina Dulcem," this sweetener is apparently a very low impact sugar derived from kiwi fruit. I find this interesting, in light of the fact that kiwi fruits themselves have a fairly high glycemic index for a fruit - but that does not mean that they don't contain a low impact sugar. All I have been able to gather about this sweetener so far is that it is about 15 times as sweet as sugar, that it is, indeed, a sugar itself, but apparently one that doesn't derange blood sugar much, or cause much insulin release, and that apparently it will, like the polyols, give most of the textural effects of sugar - moisture, caramelization, all of that. The folks who sell Trutina Dulcem also claim that it has a thermogenic effect; I have seen no other information on this.
Oh, I've learned one more thing - so far, it's hard to get, and expensive. One website I found where you could actually order the stuff wanted $18.95 for 3.5 ounces, another wanted $12.50 for 100 grams, and would only take orders of 3 containers or more. Still, the stuff sounds promising, and I may well cough up the bucks to try it sometime soon. If I do, I'll report back to you, of course.
* Lo Han Sweetener - This is a sweetener derived from a Chinese fruit, and it sounds a lot like stevia - extremely sweet, and occasionally bitter. Interestingly, the Lo Han fruit is apparently known as "the longevity fruit," and is a traditional Chinese remedy for coughs and chest congestion; it is also used as an analgesic.
* SommerSweet - I've heard Suzanne Sommers talk about her new sweetener on television, but darned if I can find any info as to what is actually in it, and it's not on the market yet, so far as I can tell, so I have no idea what it will cost. On the Rosie O'Donnell Show, Suzanne was saying that SommerSweet gives all the textural effects of sugar, so I'm wondering if this is her brand of the kiwi sweetener?
Written by Dana Carpenter
for the Lowcarbazines January 2002 magazine
When I read about FOS it clicked for me!! I have been having terrible gas and bloating 
and couldn't figure it out. I gave up all kinds of food trying to figure out what was causing my problem. Turns out my powdered stevia is loaded with the stuff (personally I don't use any artificial sweeteners) and I had eaten some cheesecake that I made with powdered stevia this morning and sure enough....running to the toilet, bloating and gas!! Now I can be free of this!! THANK YOU!!!!
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