The Truth About Sugar Alternatives

Have you cut sugar from your diet or replaced it with something you thought was “healthier”? Sugar alternatives can actually be higher in kilojoules.

- Melanie McGrice

So, you’ve decided to give up sugar. Well, that’s great if you’re one of the 52 per cent of Australians who consume more than the recommended 10 per cent of their entire energy intake in sugar. There’s no doubt Australians as a whole consume too much sweet stuff and with 62 per cent of us overweight, we don’t need it. Yet before you toss out your cookbooks and join the anti-sugar campaign raging at the moment, I’d like to stop and ask you one key question: what are you going to replace it with?

You see, the problem is this: although we consume too much sugar, sugar consumption in Australia has actually declined by 23 per cent over the past 30 years, according to The Australian Paradox, a Sydney University research paper that looked at the decline in sugar intake over the same time-frame that our intake of discretionary foods – and consequently our waistlines – continued to expand. Twenty years ago, it seemed that fat was the ingredient to blame for our bulging waistlines and what good did that do?