Life After Suger

A Consumers Guide to Alternative Sweeteners

Refined carbohydrates are often called empty calories. Actually, they’re worse than “empty” – they’re comparable to credit cards that create nutritional debt in the body. For example, a teaspoon of white sugar seems harmless – it tastes good and contains only 15 little calories. However, a closer look at the chemistry of its metabolism reveals that a tremendous effort is needed for the body to use those 15 calories as fuel.

Luckily, there are many healthier options to choose from. However, there are pros and cons to every concentrated sweetener, no matter how natural the source is. Make sure that you’re not simply replacing a diet high in refined cane sugar with a diet high in another natural sweetener.

Whole food sweeteners have a deeper, richer taste so you often need less than a refined sweetener. The best part is, all of them can help minimize inflammation when eaten in moderation. Recent studies have shown that unrefined sweeteners retain their natural anti-inflammatory antioxidants. By replacing refined sugars with whole food sweeteners, you’ll help protect your body from the inflammatory effects of unbalanced sugar levels, and reap the health benefits of free radical scavengers. Raw honey, molasses, whole stevia leaf, and fruits contain the highest amounts of antioxidants.

The following list of sweeteners is an excerpt from the Meals That Heal Inflammation Course, which is under development. It will be available at www.juliedaniluk.com later this year.

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Ingredients from Herbal or Animal Origin?

Regarding effect and compatibility we prefer ingredients of herbal origin. As a matter of principle we at Dr. Baumann do not use ingredients from animal origin. Abandonment of substances from animal origin makes sense for ethical reasons, environmental reasons and reasons of health.

As there is no or no decent legislation about experimenting with cosmetic substances on animals a producer of cosmetics never can guarantee products free of animal testing. Moreover, in many countries laws exist that place an obligation to producers of products to test products on animals before introducing them on the market. Although alternative procedures do exist already, legislators and lawmakers are often slow and sluggish to transform such findings into laws for the better of animals.

So even if producers of Skin Care products does not utilize “animal testing” by themselves or charge another company with such testing, they can never really guarantee that the processed substances had not been tested on living animals.

So even if such would be desirable from an ethical point of view, no producer of cosmetic products can guarantee products without animal testing, however he/she can guarantee products free of ingredients from animal origin. Since the origin of animal ingredients can’t be traced easily the answer can only be not to use such substances at all. (Thinks about hormones that are illegal within the EU but legal within the US, chemotherapeutica legal in the EU and the US, intensive farming, extraordinarily cruel and inhuman transportation methods to slaughterhouses etc.).

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