Nutritive and Nonnutritive Sweeteners

The sweeteners have become a regular component in our meals.
How come?
There is no doubt that from the 4 basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour, the first one is our favorite.
Once someone becomes diabetic, this privilege, to enjoy the sugar sweetness, is no longer allowed.
The first and most important step to get a good balance in the diabetic diet is to reduce the amount of the foods which contain sugar, and that contradicts with the sugar craving.
Most of the diabetic people find it very much frustrating and even depressing.
They desperately look for a solution.
First of all, most of them don't know that today there is no absolute prohibition on eating simple sugars.
You can include in your diet up to 10% of your carb consumption.
Just because of the simple fact that most diabetic people don't know and can't know where the 10% limit begins and ends they keep avoiding simple sugars.

So what these people can do?
They can use substitutes, natural or artificial sweeteners. Here are some of them.

Nutritive Sweeteners

Fructose
Fructose is a monosaccharide (simple sugar), which the body can use for energy.
Because it has a low glycemic index it does not cause the blood sugar level to rise tremendously.
It was once thought that fructose was a good substitute for sucrose (table sugar). However, the American Diabetes Association and nutritional experts have changed their minds about this.
A small amount of fructose, such as the amount found in most vegetables and fruits, is not a bad thing.
In fact, there is evidence that a little bit may help your body process glucose properly.
However, consuming too much fructose at once seems to overwhelm the body's capacity to process it. The diets of our ancestors contained only very small amounts of fructose.
These days, estimates are that about 10% of the modern diet comes from fructose.
Most of the carbohydrates we eat are made up of chains of glucose.
When glucose enters the bloodstream, the body releases insulin to help regulate it.
Fructose, on the other hand, is processed in the liver. To greatly simplify the situation: When too much fructose enters the liver, the liver can't process it all fast enough for the body to use as sugar. Instead, it starts making fats from the fructose and sending them off into the bloodstream as triglycerides.
This can increase the risk for a heart disease and there is also evidence for developing insulin resistance.

Sugar Alcohols
Such as: Isomalt, Maltitol, Lactitol, Mannitol, Sorbitol, Xylitoland more.
As a group, sugar alcohols are not as sweet as sucrose, and they contain fewer calories than sucrose.
Their flavor is like sucrose. Sugar alcohols are not metabolized by oral bacteria, and so they do not contribute to tooth decay.
Sugar alcohols are usually incompletely absorbed into the blood stream from the small intestines which generally results in a smaller change in blood glucose than "regular" sugar (sucrose).
This property makes them popular among diabetics and people on low carbohydrate diet.
However, like many other incompletely digestible substances, overconsumption of sugar alcohols can lead to bloating, diarrhea, and flatulence because they are not absorbed in the small intestine.
The sugar alcohols are used in production of sugar-free candies, chewing gums, ice cream, cakes and jams.

Nonnutritive Sweeteners

These artificial sunstitutes have no nutritional value and therefore don't harm our dental health.

Saccharin
Saccharin was first produced in 1878 and accidentally was discovered as an intensive sweetener (300 times more than sugar).
In many countries where substitutes are legal this is the most common sweetener.
The Saccharin (also known as Sweet 'n' Low) is an artificial one, which because of its basic substance, benzoic sulfimide, has effectively no nutritional value.
Although Saccharin is much sweeter than sugar, it still has an unpleasant bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations.
In countries where Saccharin is allowed as a food additive, it is used to sweeten products such as drinks, candies, medicines, and toothpaste.
In 1977, after the publication of a study indicating an increased rate of bladder cancer in rats which were fed with large doses of saccharin, the U.S. Congress required that all saccharin-containing foods display a warning label indicating that saccharin may be a cause to cancer.
No study since then performed on saccharin has ever shown a clear causal relationship between saccharin consumption and health risks in humans at normal doses.
Furthermore, other studies have shown that rats can get bladder cancer from any substance of high doses injected to them, including simple water and pure honey.