How to Sweeten Life?

By now we all know that sugar intake should be limited, not least because sugar hastens tooth decay and is a contributing cause of cancer. We have a choice of substitutes and Aspartame is readily available under several brand names such as NutraSweet and Equal. However, it’s not a benign substance, being linked to cancer, obesity, and Alzheimer’s, for example. Many people use Stevia which is a plant and causes no health problems. To me, Stevia has a bad aftertaste; it tastes like something concocted in a lab. But there are other choices.

Amazing Xylitol

There are two types:

• One made from corn;
• One made from inner birch tree bark.

It’s advisable to avoid the one made from corn as one doesn’t know whether the corn was genetically modified or not. So I’ll talk about the one made from birch bark.

• It looks and tastes exactly like white sugar;
• It can be used in baking and cooking like sugar in the same amounts;
• It is not addictive;
• It has fewer calories than sugar;
• It does not cause tooth decay.

Good For Your Teeth
Not only does it not cause tooth decay, it strengthens tooth enamel by thickening it. Occasional use doesn’t accomplish this though. It needs to be in contact with the teeth five times per 24 hours.

There are brands of toothpaste containing xylitol and brands of mouthwash likewise. If you use these products a total of five times daily on a consistent basis, the xylitol will thicken your tooth enamel. I can testify to this as I’ve been using xylitol since early 2013. The first time I went grocery shopping in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I was with a French woman named Veronica, the mother of another cancer patient. I started looking for my trusty brand of toothpaste (CloSys). Veronica picked up another one.

“Have you tried this one?” It was a French brand called Dentiste. “It has xylitol, good for your teeth.”

I’d never heard of Dentiste or xylitol but the other choices were more obscure, being all labeled in Thai. So I bought Dentiste and by the time I’d used most of that tube, I was a convert. I had the bad habit of not brushing soon enough after meals and three times, I noticed a slight soreness on a tooth, indicating an incipient cavity. But after two or three days of brushing with Dentiste, the soreness was gone. When I later went for a dental checkup, the first since mid-2011 when, in Canada, I’d had all the metal removed and replaced by ceramic materials, there were no cavities.

So I read online about xylitol and found some mouthwash containing it and have stayed with that routine ever since. Xylitol is also the only sweetener I use. I carry a small plastic bag of it in case I buy a coffee while out.

Reducing One’s Taste for Sweetness
“How can you stand your tea like that!?” I said to my Dad when I was about 14. “And how can you eat that dark chocolate!”

My Dad grinned. “Well, Jenny Wren, I gave up sugar when I was a young man.”

“Why, Dad?”

“Well, the Great Depression came along and money was short. I decided that sugar was a luxury I didn’t need so I stopped using it.”

“Just like that? In one day?!”

“No, I decided one day. Then it took a few months to stop wanting it. Now your milk chocolate tastes bad to me.”

Being a great sweetness lover, that interchange stayed in my mind for years and one day after I started reading about cancer at age 58 and learned that sugar feeds it, I remembered my Dad and I made the decision to stop using sugar. I gradually gave up the many delicious pastries I’d bought each weekend when at Whole Foods for my French sourdough bread baked that morning, and shunned the ubiquitous sugar bowl. However, for my daily coffee, I kept the scrumptious hazelnut coffee creamer, not learning until later that it’s made of:

• Sodium caseinate for longer shelf life;
• Dipotassium phosphate for thickening;
• Corn syrup, a form of sugar and presumably genetically modified;
• Partially hydrogenated soybean or cottonseed oil for creaminess;
• Mono- and di-glycerides possibly including trans fats, to emulsify the creamer with the coffee (oil and water don’t naturally mix).

Now I stick to coconut cream and a small bit of xylitol and have learned to like coffee that way. I’ve found xylitol to be available in all health food stores I’ve tried.

P.S. High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), the sweet concoction food companies include in a great many food products, has three forms: HFCS-42, HFCS-55 and HFCS-90. Those numbers indicate the percentage of the substance consisting of fructose, fruit sugar. Recently the Corn Refiners Association managed to change the name of HFCS-90 to Fructose or Fructose Syrup. So if you buy non-organic groceries, don’t believe any statement on the packet saying “No HFCS”; peer at the tiny print of the ingredients list to see if it includes “Fructose” or “Fructose Syrup”. And keep in mind that when we eat fruit, we get enzymes, fiber, vitamins and minerals along with the fructose, which all connect to each other in ways both known and so far unknown. A limited amount of fruit is OK for cancer patients, especially green apples and berries.