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Food for Fitness: Truth about Truvia

posted by ChickSpeak
Monday, July 12, 2010 at 6:53pm CDT

Mary Poppins sang about how a spoonful of sugar would help the medicine go down, however, she did not sing the facts about the granulated ingredient.Sugar, also known as sucrose, is the most common of sugars and is used to sweeten most things found in restaurants and on the grocery store shelves. I’m not going to say that sugar is evil, and should be avoided at all cost. That would be silly. Sugar makes things taste good, and I love foods that taste good.

However, I will tell you a few facts about sugar that may help you to understand why an excess of this sweet delight is not good. Nothing excites me more other than good foods like the molecular breakdown of the foods I am consuming. If sugar is made out of glucose which is a carbohydrate then how can something that has no fat in it (fatty acids) cause you to become fat? The solution is quite simple.

Your body uses sugars like fuel burning it for energy. Polysaccharides which are basically long chains of sugars are broken down into simpler sugars known as monosaccharides such as glucose. Glucose is used to fuel every cell in your body and is extremely important.

However, you can have too much glucose in your body. When this happens, your liver will convert the excess glucose into fatty acids. The fatty acids will travel via the bloodstream and is stored in places like you thighs, belly, booty, where ever your body stores adipose fat tissue. When those places become full of fat, it basically spills over and into your organs. Not a good thing.

Many chemists have concocted sugar substitutes that offer comparable sweetness without the calories and health issues. Saccharin and aspartame are used in two popular sweeteners that can be found on many tables across America, and have had cancer-causing speculations in the past.

The newest sugar substitute to hit the market is Truvia. It is made from the stevia plant and contains no calories. Truvia is all natural and kosher certified. This little sweetener contains rebiana, erythritol, and other natural flavors. Rebiana is the best tasting part of the stevia leaf. Erythritol is a naturally fermented sugar that is found in fruits like grapes and pears.

This sweetener can be found at most grocery stores as well as Walmart.

Truvia can be used to cook with, however, it cannot be bought in bulk sizes like Splenda can. The easiest way to use it now is in drinks. My favorite things to do is to take a about two hands full of ice and crush it finely in a blender.

Then I like to use the juice from one or two freshly squeezed lemons, add a few sweet strawberries as well as a few packets of Truvia. This makes for nice iced lemonade. Open a packet of Truvia and pour it onto a small plate, dampen the rim of your glass and stick in into the tiny crystals. This adds an extra sweetness to the beverage, and makes it feel more like a cocktail.

I like Truvia because its flavor is different than other sweeteners. It doesn’t taste like sugar so you shouldn’t expect it to. It can tend to leave a bitter-ish after-taste, but in my opinion it is not as bad as other artificial sweeteners. I also like the fact that it is natural and does not contain chemicals.

You can also mix Truvia with other sweeteners like honey and agave to experiment with degrees of sweetness.

A spoonful of sugar may help you medicine go down, however, you shouldn’t have to take to medicine very often. Stay healthy by lowering your sugar intake.

Fatima Meadows attends Appalachian State University. She loves trying new things especially new foods, and would love to make a career out of that.