Honesty corner: I’ve been trying to cheat the system and find a way to eat sugar-free chocolate. A cup of tea and chocolate at 3pm. Real tea. Fake sugar… sadly it’s tougher than the idea suggests.
I figured there had to be one out there that was OK.
The fake chocolate scenario:
- Loving Earth chocolate contains agave, which is 90 per cent fructose. Which is not what you want to be eating. Health food shops are awash with agave-sweetened, “sugar-free” products. Be very aware!
- Cocoa Farm chocolate is sweetened with Maltitol which is one of the common sugar alcohols. More on them in a minute. But note, they’re bad.
So are any fake sugars OK? Yep.
- Dextrose and glucose are both pure glucose, containing no fructose, so your body will detect it and process it.
- The “maltos” – maltodextrin and maltodextrose. These are another variant of glucose, in a longer chain of molecules. When they hit your saliva, they break down to maltose, which is digested as if it were pure glucose.
- Lactose – the sugar in milk products. Again, no fructose and surprisingly sweet once you’re off fructose.
This is a list, from David Gillespie’s “Sweet Poison Quit Plan“: