6 Best Sweeteners To Use For A Healthy Vegan Diet Plan

This transcription will have some mistakes because it is partially automated.

Hey guys! This is Heather from HealthyEatingStartsHere.com. Today I wanna talked about the best sweeteners to use.

So, I’m gonna go over my top ones but first thing I just wanna say that whenever you’re using sweeteners the best idea is to minimize how much you’re using. A little bit is okay and some are better than others but same time you could always over do it, so keep it minimal and then what you want to choose are one of these.

So my top sweetener is fruit, I loved to use fresh fruit on top of my morning porridge. Dried fruits and baking so raisins, things like that can sweeten things up really nicely. And then pureed fruits are really good at mixing things when you’re doing some baking as well.

So my main example would be apple sauce, great to use in baking and you wanna go for the unsweetened kind because fruit has the natural sugars in it already.

So there you go, fruit is my best sweetener.

Then if you want to use something other than a fruit, you can go for a few options and the one I used most often is unrefined sugar and I store it in my apple sugar jar once I finished my apple sauce and if you can see there it looks like little grains of sand. Ok.

You wanna look for that kind of texture rather than a crystal sugar because the crystals have been refined in some way, where’s that stuff it’s just, it’s a cane sugar so it’s just a juice from the cane, the middle of the cane just dried, where every time you see a crystal it’s been refined in some way.

Now white sugar has had all of the nutrients stripped away and then the main thing they get stripped off is molasses so that’s another sweeteners that I like to used because it has all of those nutrients in it.

But when you look at something like brown sugar, one thing I learned that was pretty surprising to me is that brown sugar is just white sugar same refined white crystals which is a bit of molasses added back to them.

So while I like molasses okay, I don’t like brown sugar because it’s mainly just the white part; and then there’s some other types of refined sugars like this one is Demerara. I don’t know if you can see that very well on camera, but that’s just crystals that have been turned a little bit brown by molasses.

Same thing with muscovado sugar looks like just brown sugar and turbinado as well, it’s darker so there’s more molasses in there but it’s still crystals. So again, you wanna look for this grainy looking, grainy looking sugar.

Stevia is a fairly new one and it’s a leaf and it’s not actually a sugar, it’s sweetens but it’s not sugar. So it’s really great for diabetics or hypoglycaemic or people who just have blood sugar fluctuation problems.

So Stevia is best when if you use it in the whole leaf form, so that would be, it comes as green leaves that look pretty much like tea leaf and you’ll see them in some tea bags, if you look in the ingredients sometimes. There’s especially one brand of tea I forget which one it is now but they often use stevia.

And then they also grind that up into a powder, if you wanna make sure you’re looking for the green powder because it comes from the leaf, where’s the white powder is somewhat the same as white sugar where things have been taken away.

So it’s always best when you’re looking at fruits to go for the whole food form as much as possible; and sweeteners are the same thing. You wanna be getting as close to whole as possible. Stevia also comes as a liquid extract, and that’s okay they used them, the green leaf to extract.

I think the green powder is a better choice but if you want to, the liquid is okay as well.

Some other sweeteners that I used so there are some liquids brown rice syrup is a good one. Molasses as I mentioned, it has all of the nutrients from the sugar even though it is technically processed and a little bit refined because it comes off.

The sugar is okay because it’s the- it’s the good part; it’s got a lot of iron, magnesium, stuff like that. And it taste great in gingerbread cookies.

Maple syrup is another liquid one, and when I talk about a maple syrup, I’m talking about like the pure stuff not the maple flavoured pancake syrups. Those aren’t, those aren’t maple syrup.

The pure stuff is okay it is a little bit processed; they have to cook it for a really long time to get it sweetened up but in the big scheme of things, it’s a pretty decent sweetener to use.

A couple that I don’t use and that often get thought of in the healthy category, I just wanted to mention quickly, so agave syrup is very highly processed they comes from a cactus.

And cactus isn’t really sweet on its own so you know they have to be processing it a lot in order to make it sweet and they -when it first came out they were saying that it didn’t have the same effect on blood sugar levels but they’re finding that it does.

So I don’t use agave, there are other options that don’t have the same downsides. The other things are the artificial sweeteners so those are ones where they say that because it doesn’t have an effect on blood sugar. I’m talking about things like Splenda, NutraSweet, Sweet n low, all those things, they’re chemicals –so they’re- they’re not good.

Stevia is the option, the natural option to use if you want a no calorie, no blood sugar or fat sweetener. So that’s a little overview of what I used and my favourite ones. And again, my favourite to used is fruit and anything else I just try to minimize as much as possible and keep as whole as possible when I get it.

So, I wanna hear from you guys and what your favourite sweeteners are? Let me know by leaving comment and I will see you guys next time.