5 Not-So-Sweet Facts About Coconut Sugar
Coconut sugar may have a health halo, but how healthy is it really? (Photo: Alamy)
Let’s face it: a diet high in fructose and excess sugar makes you weak. Simple sugars cause food cravings, age your tissues, disrupt hormone function, sap your brain energy and dopamine, and raise triglycerides – a state associated with leptin resistance, diabetes, and obesity. Sugar is kryptonite squared.
Fat, on the other hand, is pretty great, especially if you teach your body to burn it well. More and more people are hopping on the high-fat train, from bacon-eating CrossFitters to yogis downing coconut oil. A big goal of my diet, the Bulletproof Diet, is to keep harmful insulin and triglycerides low, and to teach your body to easily burn fat for fuel.
Coconut is one of the most abundant sources of high-quality fats. Coconut oil and its more potent extracts (like MCT oil) contain fats that are amazing for losing weight, building muscle, and powering your brain. They even have potent anti-microbial properties.
So, if coconut is so good, coconut sugar must be better than regular sugar, right?
No.
Companies have made coconut sugar popular in a short time by advertising it as a lower-glycemic alternative to table sugar. This marketing approach is the exact same trick that fructose marketers use to promote damaging high-fructose foods. It’s true that fructose doesn’t raise insulin as quickly as sucrose does, but that certainly doesn’t make it healthy. Too much of it is toxic to your liver and it messes with your hormones. The same is true of coconut sugar.
With that in mind, let’s delve deeper into the science of this product.
5 important facts about coconut sugar:
1. Coconut sugar comes from the sap of the cut flowers of the coconut palm. It does not come the actual coconut fruit, the part from which most beneficial coconut products are derived.
2. Many labels advertise the fact that coconut sugar has nutrients like iron, zinc and calcium. However, a quick look at coconut sugar’s nutrition facts reveals that there are only trace amounts of these nutrients — you’d have to eat a ton of coconut sugar to get them in meaningful amounts. You’d be better off chowing down on real foods.
3. Coconut sugar is lower than table sugar on the Glycemic Index (GI), which ranks carbs on how they affect your blood sugar (glucose). The GI doesn’t directly apply to sweeteners because it doesn’t measure fructose, the main component of coconut sugar. Fructose ranks low on the GI because the body can’t immediately use it for energy, so it doesn’t affect blood sugar, but it’s still kryptonite. When you eat lots of fructose it goes straight to your liver, and your liver tries to metabolize it into a useful form before it causes damage (fructose is toxic to the liver in large amounts).
4. The major component of coconut sugar is sucrose (70-79%), followed by glucose (3-9%). Sucrose (table sugar) is made up of half fructose. That makes coconut sugar 38-48.5% fructose, which is about the same as table sugar.
5. Sugar is sugar, no matter what form it’s in. If you eat too much coconut sugar it’ll tax your liver, cause toxic accumulation, increase risk for fungal infections, decrease brain function, and metabolize directly into fat.
Coconut sugar is not good for you. Period. It has trace amounts of some vitamins or minerals, but not enough to justify taking the fructose hit on your metabolism and liver. The bottom line is that you don’t want this stuff in your body.
Upgrade your diet with smart sugar alternatives
If you want something sweet, opt for raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries as a dessert option. These fruits have low fructose, antioxidants, and low risk of mold contamination (but they still have fructose, so they shouldn’t be a dietary staple!).
When it comes to sweeteners, excellent options are stevia, erythritol from non-GMO corn, or xylitol from birch trees. They don’t have any fructose in them and they won’t impact your blood sugar much, if at all. Sugar alcohols are okay for some people, but avoid them if you have problems with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO).
With a little care you can avoid sugar – including “healthy” sugars like coconut sugar and agave – without sacrificing taste. Have you cut out sugar? How did it make you feel?
Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof and creator of Bulletproof Coffee, is a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who spent 15 years and $300,000 to hack his own biology, lose 100 pounds, upgrade his IQ, and lower his biological age. You can find more about biohacking, the art of changing your environment and your biology so you perform better, on the bulletproofexec.com blog.