Making Sense of Sweeteners for a Healthy Plant-Based Diet

This is Part 1 of a two-part blog on sweeteners. This part discusses the health properties of various sweetener choices. The second part covers cooking and baking with healthy and healthy-ish sweeteners.

One of the biggest challenges I faced when I moved to a healthy plant-based diet—from a vegan diet—was understanding sweeteners. Before then, I’d mostly used white and brown sugar. I had very little experience with alternatives. Gradually I learned more about whole-food sweeteners. More recently, when I conducted research for my Plant-Based Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook, I found out why paying attention to sweeteners matters so much for our health.

Why worry about sweeteners?

Humans evolved to enjoy sweet foods, because these foods were, and still are, quick and efficient sources of energy. Sweet foods provide glucose, fuel for the brain and muscles, so we evolved to prefer sweet foods like fruit and honey when we had access to them. But we evolved in environments of scarcity, and now we live in a time of abundant, available, and cheap sweet foods. Ripe fruit is still around, but now we have cupcakes.

Our built-in sweet tooth and the easy availability of sweet foods are dangerous for us. High sugar consumption is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic conditions. Sugar can cause blood sugar spikes and crashes, which can lead to energy slumps and increased food cravings. Sugar can create oxidative stress, which can trigger chronic inflammation. In the colon’s microbiome, sugar can feed unhealthy gut bacteria. The desire for sweetness was once an advantage for survival—now it's a liability, making it difficult to stay fit and healthy.

Sweeteners covered in this blog

This blog compares the following 12 sweeteners:

Medjool dates
Date sugar
Date paste
Ripe bananas
Agave syrup
Maple syrup
Coconut sugar
Date syrup (strained)
Organic cane sugar
Granulated white sugar
Brown sugar
Brown rice syrup

I specify medjool dates, but other kinds of dates, including dogleg Noor dates, have similar nutritional profiles.

I didn’t include artificial or zero-calorie plant sweeteners in my coverage. Most of us know the downsides of artificial sweeteners like aspartame. For plant-based sweeteners, see the post from Dr. Greger on nutritionfacts.org about stevia: it offers no advantage over other sweeteners for blood sugar levels, and high usage can lead to DNA damage in the gut. Dr. Greger also recommends staying away from erythritol, a sugar alcohol that is often mixed with monk fruit to create monk fruit sweetener products. (The research on monk fruit itself appears to be sparse.) This information convinced me to shy away, at least for now, from relying on these products for my sweetener needs.

I didn’t include molasses because its strong flavor prohibits its use for a wide variety of sweetening purposes, for most people anyway. If you use a lot of molasses, great — it’s a healthy sweetener.

Whole-food sweeteners

Of the 12 sweeteners on my list, only four are whole-food, i.e., consisting of the whole plant they come from. They are the first four on the list: medjool dates, date sugar, date paste, and ripe bananas.

Extracted and processed sweeteners and sugars

The remaining eight sweeteners on the list are created by extracting sugar from a plant and refining it with lighter or heavier industrial processes. Some of these sweeteners retain some healthy nutrients from the source plant, and others do not.

Comparison of sweetener nutritional values

I put together the following table to show the basic nutritional values for each of the 12 sweeteners under consideration.

Table 1: Nutrition information for ½ cup each (approximately 100 grams) of 12 sweeteners

Arranged in each category from lowest to highest grams of sugar

    Sweeteners
    Calories
    Total Carbs (g)
    Sugars (g)
    Protein (g)
    Fiber (g)
    Glycemic Index
  


    Whole food sweeteners
  

    Ripe bananas
    85
    20
    16
    1
    2
    48
  

    Date paste
    314
    76
    54
    2
    8
    55
  

    Medjool dates
    282
    75
    63
    2
    7
    55
  

    Date sugar
    300
    75
    75
    2
    6
    50
  

    Extracted and processed sweeteners
  

    Brown rice syrup
    328
    79
    48
    0
    0
    98
  

    Maple syrup
    261
    67
    60
    0
    0
    54
  

    Agave syrup
    310
    76
    71
    0
    0
    15
  

    Date syrup (strained)
    320
    80
    80
    0
    0
    55
  

    Coconut sugar
    320
    85
    85
    0
    0
    54
  

    Organic cane sugar
    387
    95
    95
    0
    0
    60
  

    Brown sugar
    373
    96
    96
    0
    0
    65
  

    Granulated white sugar
    387
    100
    100
    0
    0
    65
  

Notes:

None of the sweeteners contain significant fat.
The glycemic index (GI) indicates how quickly a food raises blood sugar levels compared to pure glucose, which has a glycemic index of 100. The ranges are as follows:
- Low GI: 1–55
- Medium GI: 56–69
- High GI: 70-100
Unstrained date syrup is the same as date paste, generally with fewer calories per ounce because of increased water content.
Many vegans choose not to eat granulated white sugar because it's usually processed with bone char, a substance derived from animal bones. Bone char helps whiten the sugar and remove impurities.

Takeaways from this nutritional information

Let’s distill some of the information from the above table.

Fiber. Only the four whole-food sweeteners contain fiber. While the amounts aren’t particularly large for a typical serving, natural fiber is critical for slowing digestion, blunting blood sugar spikes, and creating the sensation of fullness. When sugar and fiber are digested together, as in dates, the effects of fiber are especially positive.

Higher calories. Nine of the 12 sweeteners have calorie counts over 300 per half-cup, some closer to 400 calories. This translates to about 37-38 calories per tablespoon.

Lower calories. Medjool dates and maple syrup contain 282 and 261 calories per half-cup, respectively, just over 30 calories per tablespoon. Only bananas offer a much lower calorie alternative (85 calories per half-cup), although typically a greater amount of bananas is needed to achieve comparable sweetness to the other choices. Dates are said to be about five times sweeter than bananas.

Low glycemic index. Agave syrup has a very low glycemic index, because it’s composed mostly of fructose. Unlike glucose, which quickly enters the bloodstream and raises blood sugar, fructose has to be metabolized by the liver, where it’s converted into glucose or fat. Since fructose doesn't raise blood sugar as quickly as glucose, it results in a slower and lower glycemic response.

High glycemic index. Brown rice syrup has a very high glycemic index for the opposite reason—it consists mostly of glucose, with relatively low fructose content.

Other nutrients. A number of these sweeteners—especially dates, date syrup, and maple syrup—contain various vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, polyphenols, and other nutrients that don’t appear on my chart. However, in the amounts these sweeteners are usually eaten, the nutrient boosts are not significant. Dates are showing nutritional promise, though.

The evidence for dates. In a scholarly review in the Journal Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews, the authors gathered the results of studies of dates’ effects on blood glucose and other indices of metabolic health. They concluded that moderate date consumption does not worsen key diabetes indicators.

The bottom line is that all the sweeteners except bananas have concentrated calories and should be eaten sparingly, though whole-food date sweeteners have been shown so far in a number of studies not to raise levels of certain disease indicators. In fact, if you are underweight and trying to gain weight, adding dates to your diet may be a good way to get a decent number of calories without other unwanted effects.

Price of sweeteners

Yes, but aren’t dates expensive? Let’s look at the prices. Using online search engines (including ChatGPT, but not exclusively), I found these average ranges, from low to high per ounce.

Table 2: Price per ounce: ranges for 12 sweeteners, November 2024

Note that one ounce is equivalent to 1/8 cup

Bananas $.04

Granulated white sugar $.06 - $.08

Brown sugar $.09 - $.12

Organic cane sugar $.11 - $.12

Agave syrup $.25 - $.50

Coconut sugar $.25 - $.50

Medjool dates $.33 - $.50

Brown rice syrup $.35 - $.80

Date syrup $.40 - $1.20

Date paste $.50 - $.70

Maple syrup $.50 - $1.00

Date sugar $.60 - $.80

Points about prices and product:

Some sweeteners are sweeter than others. Agave syrup and date syrup are sweeter than maple syrup. If a recipe calls for maple syrup, I tend to use 2/3 the amount called for if substituting agave syrup or date syrup. (More on these kinds of topics in my second blog.)
Shop the bulk section. I buy medjool dates from the bulk section of my grocery store (WinCo, in the western U.S.). They are typically about $6.00/pound ($.37/ounce), but occasionally they’re on sale for less than that.
Buy large quantities. For most products, you can likely beat the prices here if you buy big packages of the sweeteners rather than small (although that is not always true).
Compare prices. I buy a number of products online. I usually check Amazon and Walmart to compare prices, and sometimes I go to the distributor or manufacturer’s site. Many brands are organic, which I look for.

Three categories of sweeteners, in my mind

I am not much of a banana person. I stick with dates for sweeteners as much as possible, but I do use a few of the other sweeteners sparingly when dates can’t be used, for my purposes anyway (see my upcoming second blog). So I came up with these three categories.

Healthy

These are the whole-food sweeteners: Medjool dates, date sugar, date paste, and ripe bananas.

Healthy-ish

For some recipes, I will use the following sweeteners if dates are not feasible (because of texture or color challenges): agave syrup, date syrup, coconut sugar, and maple syrup. These sweeteners are healthier than the unhealthy category in terms of calories, grams of sugar, and/or glycemic index.

Unhealthy

I don’t eat the remaining four sweeteners: brown rice syrup, organic cane sugar, brown sugar, or granulated white sugar.

Tips on using healthy sweeteners

In my everyday eating, I lean heavily on dates and other dried fruits when sweeteners are needed. Here are some examples:

I top oatmeal or soy yogurt with dates or other dried fruits, or sometimes with date sugar. (Note that I buy date sugar that’s been ground to a fine powder.)
For snacks or a quick sweet treat, I might stuff a medjool date with a couple of walnuts or other nuts.
I am fortunate to have weaned myself off of milk and sugar in tea and coffee, so I don’t face any issues on that score (I would probably favor agave syrup if I wanted to sweeten a drink).
Date paste or sliced whole dates make a great sandwich with either tahini, almond butter, or peanut butter.

What about using these sweeteners in recipes, like for cookies? How can we use the healthiest sweeteners whenever possible? That’s the topic of my next blog.

Comments or questions?

Either enter them the Comments section below or email me. Thank you!

Linda TylerDecember 15, 2024Comment