Protein. But seriously . . . While eating more protein can curb your cravings for sugar, you would be kidding yourself to say it is a good substitute for the sweet taste of sugar. The truth is that most of us need to minimize our desire for that sweet taste altogether. For many people who have been addicted to sugar for years, simply eating something sweet — sugar substitutes included "â can cause the same harmful metabolic response as sugar itself. This can lead to insulin resistance, hypoglycemia and eventually diabetes. Therefore, if you are addicted to sugar you should avoid sweets altogether.
For you non-sugar addicts who just want something sweet tasting once in a while, stick to natural sweeteners. This means sweeteners that are not produced by chemically altering an otherwise natural substance. Under this definition, some of the well-known unnatural sweeteners are aspartame (nutrasweet), saccharin, high fructose corn syrup, maltitol, sorbitol, sucralose, and many others. It seems there are new sugar substitutes or artificial sweeteners being introduced all the time. Foods processed through chemical alteration are not foods at all. They are drugs. They are highly toxic and interfere with countless metabolic processes in our bodies, especially in our brains. Aspartame alone has been the subject of over 70% of all the complaints (including reports of headaches, dizziness, and vomiting being the most common) received by the FDA since 1980 under its Adverse Reactions Monitoring System.
Some of the more healthy, non-chemically processed, natural sweeteners are maple syrup, raw honey, brown rice syrup, sucanant, and stevia. Among these, stevia has the least amount of calories and virtually no glycemic effect. Stevia is an herb native to South America that has only recently begun being harvested in the United States. It is estimated to be 150 to 400 times sweeter than sugar and has been the main sweetener in Japan for years. Stevia has been extensively studied and used in other countries for hundreds of years with no known harmful effects.
