Saturday candy?

[abendgules]

Thanks to several months of enforced inactivity, I'm feeling uncomfortably round, and had an unpleasant encounter with a measuring tape recently.

So I'm resolved to get out of the office at lunchtime more often for walks - daily isn't too often - and I'm considering drastic measures, for me: Saturday Candy.

I encountered this at Crown this year in Nordmark - that some good Swedish parents still limit their kids' intake of junk to Saturdays. I'd never heard of something so, so, so....sensible. Sheesh. (Especially when the Western world is staring an obesity epidemic down the gullet - how do the Swedes manage it, when everyone else is so helpless?)

So I'm seriously thinking: I don't eat a lot of candy, but I do like biscuits, particularly at work. I do like a sweet to follow dinner, of some kind. And I don't know if I can follow through, when my beanpole-shaped-sweetie noshes down on his treats in the evening. Could I actually follow a Saturday Candy rule?

(I'm painfully suggestible, I've discovered. Don't remember this always being the case, but by god, if I'm reading about someone enjoying a pot of coffee, all of a sudden nothing short of a pot of coffee will do...similarly when someone says 'I'd love a cup of tea' on TV, etc.)

I was put in mind of it (see? suggestible) by a BBC food article about a family giving up sugar because of a daughter's Type 1 diabetes.

I know a few people who avoid sugar, but why would you substitute dextrose for sucrose (shown in one recipe)? It all turns into sugar in your body, doesn't it?

Comments

[my-stitching.livejournal.com]

Yes. Basically the only difference between different types of sugars (dextrose, sucrose, fructose, etc) is either the shape or the number of carbons and in some cases whether they form chains. Some are absorbed directly and others are broken down into the simplest form which is most useful for our bodies to absorb: glucose aka dextrose. So using dextrose rather than sucrose does nothing.

Good luck with candy saturdays. It sounds like a good concept!

[my-stitching.livejournal.com]

With the comments below differing from what I had remembered studying in anatomy and physiology, I went back and looked. All sugars break down into glucose (dextrose), fructose and galactose. There are others but these are the common ones. They all have the same chemical composition but differ slightly in how they are ordered (isomers). All three of these are absorbed directly into the system via the small intestine. All of the more complex sugars break down into these. Sucrose is glucose and fructose, for example. There are three things which set fructose apart from the others. One bad thing, one good thing and one neutral thing.

Neutral: Glucose and galactose are absorbed via cotransport with sodium ions. Fructose is absorbed via facilitated diffusion.

Good: Fructose has a low glycemic index which means that it doesn't raise your blood sugar or require the body to kick out insulin to deal with it. This is a BIG positive for diabetics.

Bad: If you eat a very large amount of fructose, the body can't absorb it all and, instead of being absorbed in the small intestine, it goes to the large intestine where it sort of ferments with the natural bacterial flora and causes tummy upset. (ETA: This only seems to happen when glucose and fructose are not balanced. Fructose with glucose seems to help the fructose absorb more efficiently)

Verdict: Eating or cooking with dextrose instead of sucrose gives no real benefit unless you were planning on eating 50 pounds of it. And you are probably raising your blood sugar more than needed. It is just another bit of pseudoscience that comes our way to try and "improve" our diets when in actuality, it does jack all. Sea salt, for example, is actually LESS healthy than table salt. But it costs more and has more articles written about it. ;)