203: Allulose: a Sweetener That's Actually Good For You!

What if there were a sweetener that tasted like a treat and was not only not bad for you, but actually good for you?  One that naturally boosted your GLP-1, helped you feel fuller longer and didn’t mess up the friendly bacteria in your microbiome?  If you enjoy the occasional sweet tasting treat, your health will get better if you know about allulose!

A recent publication about ace-k
Episode 169: Calorie Casino
Episode 165: Why Uric Acid Matters to You
Joyride candy: https://www.joyridesweets.com/?srsltid=AfmBOopCUfDpRj_LOqXiv0FzwhLnsxoKBvuEsoe8Zyc35-_gRRVe5eD3 
FitLane Allulose:  https://www.amazon.com/Allulose-Sweetener-Fit-Lane-Nutrition/dp/B07RG16QJJ?th=1
Rx Sugar: www.rxsugar.com
Doctors talking about allulose on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqNlZDivjAg  

My Website: www.healthcouragecollective.com

My Udemy Course about Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy

Are you ready to give your cells their best chance to not have to stop living before they die by allowing them access to physiologic levels of hormones, but aren't sure how to even get started?  Join the waitlist for my new beta program here and help me figure out how best to help wonderful women like you get the hormone care they deserve!

Come visit me: www.healthcouragecollective.com

email me: [e-mail]

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What if there were a sweetener that tasted like a
treat and was not only not bad for you, but
actually good for you, One that naturally boosted your GLP,
one helped you feel fuller longer, and didn't mess up
the friendly bacteria in your microbiome. If you enjoy the
occasional sweet tasting treat, your health will get better if
you know about al eulose. You're listening to the Health

(00:23):
Courage Collective Podcast, Episode two hundred and three, A sweetener
That's actually good for you. Welcome to the Health Courage
Collective Podcast, the show for women who are too busy
to slog through hours of generalized and applicable and often
contradictory health information, but too smart to ignore that a
few minutes of focused attention now can prevent years of

(00:46):
suffering in the future. I'm your host, Christina Hackett, a
pharmacist who doesn't want you to live on prescriptions, a
certified coach specifically trained to maximize your potential, and a
compulsive learner obsessed with preventative, edge, holistic and integrated medicine.
I'm on a mission to increase your physical and mental
resilience so you can fearlessly look forward to your next

(01:08):
forty plus limitless years. Your time is down. Let's go. Hi,
man a friend, Welcome to today's episode. I hope you're
having a great day so far. What are you working
on right now? I always assume that you're walking or driving,
or cleaning or cooking, or giving your dog a bath,
or watering your plants or doing woodworking or something cool.

(01:31):
I hope it's going well. How are your algorithms? Isn't
it great to have a way to put healthy behaviors
that you'd like to do more consistently on autopilot. Getting
algorithms running lets you do what you want to do
with less will power and conscious thought required. Pretty great.
Today we're going to talk about something potentially pretty awesome,

(01:53):
so I think it'll be useful for you. I'm sure
you know that our brains have evolved to reward us
when we find something that tastes sweet. We get a
lot of dopamine release in the wanting and seeking out
of sweetness. Our brains can get addicted to sugar through
the same pathways that they get addicted to drugs. Craving, seeking,
being rewarded when we score some and the reward diminishes

(02:16):
over time to the point that we feel like we
can't function in our life without this substance. It sounds extreme,
but it's really true. I was listening to someone with
a doctor degree in tasting or something. I'm sure her
actual doctorate degree has a more elegant sounding name, but
she studied taste and the effects different tastes have on us.

(02:39):
And when she was talking about sweetness, she said, a
huge problem is that many of us, especially Americans. She
was originally from Italy, I think, and oh no, actually,
I'm pretty sure she was Argentinian, but she lived in
Italy for a while something like that. Anyway, she said,
the problem is that most Americans live very sweet lives,

(03:00):
and I thought that was cute. She said, We're always
putting something into our mouth every few minutes or hours,
and almost all of it is sweet. We're never free
from sweetness. It messes with our brains and our ability
to have peak tasting experiences. If you're constantly sipping something
sweet flavored all day long, chewing sweet gum, eating sweet

(03:21):
breath mints, having a sweet beverage with every meal, eating
desserts and sweet snacks all the time, it messes with
your brain chemistry. So I feel like the best antidote
to this messed up state is to reduce the sweetness
of your every day. Ideally, you'd never have anything sweet
other than the occasional carrot or walla walla onion. For sure,

(03:43):
be healthier if you did that, But it's so far
removed from what we're used to and what we everyone
around us in our lives do, that it feels extreme.
It wouldn't be extreme to our biology, just to our
psychology and our sociology. We're hardwired to enjoy and seek
out sweetness, So it makes sense that now that it's

(04:03):
so easy to be swimming in sweetness compared to a
few hundred years ago, that we find ourselves swimming in
sweetness all the time. It's cheap, easy and pleasurable. But
like most other things that are cheap, easy and pleasurable,
it's not in our best interest. Sorry, Pamela Anderson, I
completely forgot that she was on the show Home Improvement,

(04:27):
Lisa the tool time girl. That was completely wiped from
my memory. All I was remembering was Baywatch And apparently
now she's all about plant based living, animal rights and
being your authentic self. Who doesn't wear makeup, so more
power to her, and I think my attempted insult no
longer applies. Let's try again. Like most other things that

(04:49):
are cheap, easy, and pleasurable, it's not in our best interest.
Sorry YouTube. Better so since we're all used to having
lots of sweetness in our everyday but sugar is literally
killing us. Several non sugar sweeteners have come onto the
scene with the best of intentions. The idea is that

(05:09):
they'll give us the pleasure of sugar without the metabolic consequences.
I'm sure you know that they haven't all lived up
to that hope. Several studies, including a twenty seventeen meta analysis,
show that consuming artificial sweeteners increases body weight and waste
circumference and way worse than that. There are other studies
suggesting that worse metabolic health and poorer glucose control come

(05:33):
from using artificial sweeteners. That's catastrophic for your long term
risk of all of the common diseases of aging. Remember
that metabolic health is what drives your risk for all
of those common chronic diseases of aging. There could be
a few reasons for these problems with these sweeteners, including
the postulation that our digestive hormones and enzymes and processes

(05:56):
start as soon as we taste our food, so well
prepared by the time that the food actually gets down
to our intestines. We talked about that in episode one
sixty nine Calorie Casino. That's one of my favorite episodes,
by the way. But I think that the main reason
is that while studies show that humans can't metabolize a
lot of these sweeteners, therefore they should happen net neutral

(06:18):
effect on us. Our human physiology is largely controlled by
non human cells, our friendly gut bacteria or non friendly
as the case may be. When you eat things that
alter the population ratios of all of the different strains
of bacteria in your large intestines, you can alter your digestion,
nutrient absorption, mood, cravings, and general ability to function. On

(06:43):
a cellular level, many noncaloric sweeteners profoundly change bacterial ecosystems
in ways that promote inflammation, impaired glucose metabolism, altered cravings,
and more. I wanted to briefly i'd ask if you're
curious about female bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, the kind that's

(07:05):
usually started around the time of perimenopause. What it is,
what it does, how it works, what it's like. If so,
you should check out my U to Me course called
the Basics of Female Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy. The course
goes over the pros and cons of using hormone treatment,
which hormones are usually included with BHRT, how they're used,

(07:26):
the lab tests that are used, some tips for finding
a prescriber in pharmacy to work with, and how to
develop a rough estimate of how much BHRT will cost you.
If you've been wondering whether bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is
right for you, it's time to close that open loop,
stop wandering, and move forward with confidence. En role in

(07:47):
my course today, as a listener of the podcast, you
can get a special discount for the very best price.
It's a no brainer. I would just tell you the
coupon code, but you to Me makes me change it
every month, So check the show notes or go to
www dot Healthcourage collective dot com slash you to Me
to find the special podcast listener discount code that's only

(08:08):
for awesome people like you. Okay, back to the episode.
I think it's useful to quickly go through the list
of low or no calorie sweeteners and what we know
about them, which isn't enough for the most part. Okay,
so first we have sacrin. This is what's in sweet
and low. A twenty fourteen wrap study showed that sacrin

(08:28):
decreases glucose tolerance and reduces golp one. You probably know
from all the hype arounds some of glutide intercepetide that
golp one helps you metabolize glucose better and keeps you
feeling full. Almost all people in the Western world need
more golp one, not less. In a twelve week head
to head trial of four sweeteners, sachrin was the only

(08:50):
sweetener to significantly increase body weight. The weight increase was
similar to that of sucrose DeCross regular sugar, even though
the sacrin people consumed overall fewer calories than the sugar eaters.
You should always do your own research and draw your
own conclusions, but my opinion is that you should never

(09:10):
consume sacron, and you'd be better off eating or drinking
sugar than substituting sacrin for it. Okay, Second, aspartame. This
is in equal and nutris sweet most notably, it's the
main sweetener in almost all diet sodas and many of
the other zero sugar items. It's pretty ubiquitous. In the
same rat study from twenty fourteen mentioned when we talked

(09:32):
about sacron, aspartame was also found to cause glucose intolerance
via microbiome disruption. A meta analysis of several studies on
body weight and adipuacity reported that consumption of diet beverages
sweetened with aspartain was positively correlated with increases in body

(09:53):
weight and BMI. My opinion here is that aspartame is
also on the natty list and you should do what
you can to avoid it. Okay. Third is ace K,
which I hadn't really heard of much before. It stands
for ace sulfame potassium. Apparently, it's very common in sugar
free stuff, including coke zero and diet pepsi. It's a

(10:14):
sweetener that's almost never used alone, but it works well
with other sweeteners that have a bitter aftertaste because it
helps to mask that bitterness. Studies agree that it increases
metabolic impairment that you don't want, and I'll put a
link in the show notes to a twenty twenty three
study showing that regular ace K consumption is associated with

(10:35):
a seventy percent increased risk of type two diabetes compared
to non consumers. Seventy percent. That's a big deal. I
say stay away. Coke zero and diet pepsi are problematic. Okay.
Fourth sucralose. It's used in a ton of things, but
it first came around as splend up. Its main advantage

(10:57):
was that it's stable at a wide range of temperatures,
so you could make rosen treats with it and also
bake at high temperatures with it. It has been pretty
definitively found to decrease glucose tolerance in humans, which matters,
and it was also shown in that same twenty fourteen
study in rats to alter the microbiome in a way
that decreases glucose metabolism. Increased consumption of sucralose in animals

(11:23):
leads to increased body weight and fass. Interestingly, a twenty
twenty one study showed that females but not males, who
consumed a sucralose sweetened beverage before a meal eight more
calories at that meal than they did when they consumed
a sucrose regular sugar sweetened beverage. Sucralose has more data

(11:44):
showing that it has negative effects on metabolic health, glucose tolerance,
and satiety than any other artificial sweetener. Sucralose is not
a good option, and it does not make you healthier. Okay, Fifth,
let's talk about zelatol. Xylotol is a sugar alcohol that's
actually naturally occurring in several fruits and vegetables, including strawberries, raspberries,

(12:06):
and cauliflower. Humans also produce a small amount of xylotol
during the metabolism of glucose, which I think is pretty
crazy and I didn't know before. So far, studies show
that xylatol sweetened things don't impair glucose control or insulin sensitivity.
I think of xylotol as a good guy. Gums sweetened
with xylatol are actually good for your teeth, and there's

(12:27):
a nose spray with xylotol that helps reduce biofilm formation
and the chance of getting a sinus infection. The main
downside is that cats and dogs and bunnies very important
absolutely cannot have xylotol, so you have to be careful
if you use it frequently in your everyday food and
you have pets okay. Number six, Another naturally occurring sugar

(12:50):
alcohol found in fruits and vegetables like grapes, peaches, and pears,
is erythritol. It is also produced during metabolic processes in
the human body. It's also healthy for your teeth, which
I didn't know. It doesn't cause the same gastrointestinal distress
that other sugar alcohols can. Limited studies show that it
either has neutral or positive effects on glucose metabolism, insulin sensitivity,

(13:14):
body weight, and liver effect accumulation. Erythritol is in my opinion,
on the good Guy list. Erythrotol and its friends zylatol
are both heat stable, so you can bake with them,
but they don't caramelize the way sugar does, so the
result is a bit different, and they can have kind
of a weird cooling sensation in your mouth, which is
a little different than what you typically get with sugar.

(13:38):
Seventh is stevia. You probably know that stevia comes from
a South American plant. While studies hoping to show that
stevia improved metabolic health, showed that it didn't. It didn't
harm glucose tolerance either. It does alter your microbiome, but
the alterations didn't show to cause any negative effects. So

(13:58):
in my opinion, I think stevia is pretty much fine. Eighth,
we have magrasides. Have you heard of these? While I
was looking at the studies for everything on this list,
those previous seven sweeteners kept coming up over and over,
and I kept thinking to myself, hang on, but what
about monk fruit. I personally use the lecanto monk fruit
slash erythritol combo all the time, So magrasides are what

(14:22):
is in monk fruit. It's really similar to stevia in
that it intensely sweet, so you only need a tiny
amount of monk fruit to equal the same amount of
sweetness as sugar. That's how stevia is too. Monk fruit
has been used for hundreds of years in Eastern medicine
as a digestive aid. Monk fruit requires bacteria in your

(14:42):
gut to cleave off the glucose molecules on it, but
so far, no studies have shown that monk fruit does
much to alter the composition or functionality of the microbiome.
But there also aren't a lot of studies. Personally, I
use it that I think it's a good option. Whew, Okay,
number nine, you made it to the sweetener that we're
actually here to talk about today. I hope this review

(15:04):
is useful in helping you to make smart choices about
sweetened food and beverages in your life. This sweetener is
a little bit newer to be widely used, which I
would normally think of as a bad thing, but because
we want a lot of data before we start using it.
But it was actually discovered in the nineteen forties. It's
called allelose. Have you heard of it. It's a natural

(15:26):
sugar found in jackfruit, figs kiwis, and maple syrup. It's
partially absorbed from the intestines, and some of it is
digested by bacteria into short chain fatty acids. I think
that's a big deal because short chain fatty acids are
really good for your bacteria and the cells that line
your intestines. You want to eat things that are digested

(15:46):
into short chain fatty acids. The more short chain fatty
acids your bacteria make from the food you eat, the
better your digestion and glucose control, and the lower your
inflammation and risk of colon cancer. An even bigger deal
is that allulose has been shown to increase GLP one.
It's only been proven by studies in animals so far,
but animals who eat allulos tend to eat less total

(16:09):
food than those eating anything sweetened with anything else having
improved glucose tolerance, and they don't gain weight. These are
things that GLP one helps to do. Allulose, as a
substrate for something called sglt one that differentiates between real
sugar and fake sugar, actually promotes satiety and food satisfaction.

(16:33):
It activates real reward circuits in your brain. That's the
opposite of what most artificial sweeteners do. They can fuse
your brain by tasting sweet, but not activating reward circuits
in your brain. Most artificial sweeteners make you hungrier and
less satisfied. Alulose does the opposite. Allulose isn't as sweet

(16:55):
as sucrose, but it is sweet. Probably through its stimulation
of GLP one. It can help your glucose go down
without your insulin having to go up. That matters because
you really, really really don't want to have chronically high
insulin levels. If you eat a ton of alulose, you
can get cramping in diarrhea, but it's a lot, like

(17:16):
fifty grams or something. Alulose has been shown to blunt
the post prandial glucose spike after a meal. So if
you eat something that makes your blood sugar shoot up,
like tortilla chips do to me, and you also have
some alulos at the same time, that spike won't go
as high. That's pretty cool. Organic apple cider vinegar also

(17:38):
does that a little bit. I try to remember to
have a little bit of apple sidl vinegar before dinner
every day. I don't always remember, but I try. And
since I drink apple cider or vinegar a lot, I've
gotten used to the taste and I kind of started
to like it. In my house, we like to take
turns making mocktails with Sunday dinners. Sometimes will use a shrub,
which is a vinegar based flavor at dip, and I

(18:01):
like shrubs a lot because I've gotten so used to
the taste of drinking apple cider renegar. I also have
this organic peachsider reneger that has the mother stuff in
it there too, and I like that one too. Anyway,
I made us a simple syrup out of allulose to
use in my mocktail creation that I made last Sunday,
and I had some left over, so I started doing

(18:22):
my nightly shot of apple sider vinegar with a bit
of allulose simple syrup and water, of course, because you
don't want to drink it straight. And it's really good.
I really like it, partly because I've gotten used to
liking apple cider vinegar, but when it's sweetened a little
bit with the allulos, actually really good and I look
forward to it. Okay, So there are some more small
studies that are starting to show that allulose blocks glucose

(18:44):
transport into the liver, which could help prevent fatty liver disease,
and some studies that show that alulose improves fat oxidation,
helping with fat loss, and some that show that it
amplifies the benefits of exercise as a natural GLP one agonist.
It helps lower blood sugar, it improves and insolent sensitivity,

(19:06):
boosts satiety, and delays gastric emptying, making you feel fuller
for longer. It might even lower your uric acid, which
is a big deal. Even if you don't have gout.
We talked all about uric acid in episode one hundred
and sixty five. That's a good one to go back
and listen to if you want to know why it matters.
You'll remember from that episode that high uric acid is

(19:27):
bad in many other ways than just gout, including increasing
your blood pressure and your total body inflammation and your
cardiovascular risk. So lowering your uric acid is a good thing,
and alulose might help with that. The reason I think
you should really know about alulose is that some of
the other sweeteners we talked about make your health worse.

(19:48):
Some of them probably allow you to enjoy sweetness without
making your health worse, but allulose is the only one
that seems to make your health better. That's pretty great.
Many more studies will need to be done to get
definitive answers about to what extent allulose consistently lowers blood sugar,
blunts those blood glucose spikes, decreases your uric acid, increases

(20:13):
your feelings of fullness, reduces cravings, decreases fat deposition, increases
exercise performance, and improves gup barrier function. At the very least,
we know that it doesn't do the bad things the
quote bad guy sweeteners do, like confuse your brain and
negatively alter your microbiome population, And it doesn't cause all

(20:34):
of the negative effects of sucrose, like advanced glycation end products,
high blood glucose, high uric acid levels, chronic inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction,
increased cravings, fat gain, insulin resistance, and all of the
chronic diseases of aging that come along with that, which
are all of them. Right now, there are around five

(20:55):
hundred publications on PubMed discussing the usefulness of alulo and
none of them show any harm. Like erythritol, allulose is
not calorie free. It provides zero point two calories program
sucrose regular sugar is four calories programs, so thirty grams
of sugar is one hundred and twenty calories and thirty

(21:16):
grams of alulose or erythritol is six calories. Some doctors
are prescribing allulose to their patients and noticing metabolic improvements,
so those patients have a specified dose of how much
alulose to get at a certain time of day. Some
doctors are using its natural GLP one boosting effects to

(21:38):
help their patients get off of GLP agonist prescriptions like
manngero and ozembic. Alulos's ability to boost JLP one is
way less pronounced than injecting huge doses of those agonists,
but it's better than nothing when implementing your exit strategy
from those drugs. Taking some alulose during your meal will

(22:00):
help blunt the glucose spike you get from any carbs
in your meal. At the beginning is probably best, like
my idea of using the little allulose simple syrup to
sweeten your apple cide or vinegar before a carb containing meal,
but if you have it anytime around the time of
your room meal, it will be useful, So an allulose
sweetened little dessert at the end would also be fine.

(22:21):
A lot of allulose on an empty stomach is more
likely to give you an upset stomach, but it's not
a guarantee. It seems like around twenty to thirty grams
per day of allulose is a good dose. Fifty grams
in a day is pushing it into possible diarrhea territory.
So how do you get a helpful amount of allulose

(22:42):
more and more companies are starting to use allulose as
their sweetener, which I think is fabulous. We might need
to do a Allulose Part two episode after I've tried
out more things and seen if there's anything more useful
that I can tell you that will help you. So far,
I bought a bag of powdered alulos from fit Laying Nutrition.
That's just what came up online, and I like it fine.

(23:03):
I've made my mocktail simple syrup and I've used it
to sweeten various things like whipped cream, chopped berries, and
my homemade lack of Bascillus roy de roy yogurt that
I make, and probably some other things. It's finer than
regular sugar, which is kind of nice. It's also not
as sweet as regular sugar, but overall it's been great.
You can bake with it. I doubt it caramelizes the

(23:24):
same way regular sugar does, but I haven't tried it
yet so far. No fake brown sugar version like with
the Vocanto munk fruit. The homemade uses of alulose is
pretty limits, though, which is way fun. There is some
kind of candy called joy Ride that's only available at Target.
I think I only know this because my fifteen year

(23:45):
old wanted to buy someone. We were at Target because
he said his nineteen year old brother told him to
try it. The sour watermelons were really good. Anyhow, it
was started by some kind of YouTubers, which naturally makes
me roll my eyes. But when we found it at
Target and I saw that it was eaten with alulose,
I was in guess not all YouTubers are ridiculous. Well,
it might still be ridiculous, but but some of them

(24:07):
have good candy ingredients, so that's an option joy ride.
But of course it's way more expensive than regular candy.
There are several doctors that I think are doing good
work in the world who endorse the company called r
X Sugar. RX Sugar has various allulose sweetened items. I
just got a box of things from them that I
haven't had much of a chance to try out yet.

(24:28):
I might need to give you an update once I do.
I got maple syrup and this coco puff cereal thing
that I haven't tried yet. I did try a chocolate
mint chocolate bar, which was actually really good, and my
glucose level didn't change by a single point up or down,
unlike built bars, which I like and have protein, but
they do increase my glucose pull. You can get RX

(24:48):
sugar from their website, but it looks like Target, Walmart,
and Amazon have their syrups and maybe a few other
things too. I have absolutely zero affiliation with any sweetener companies,
but I'll put some leaks in the show note in
case you find them useful. They're not affiliate links. As always,
do whatever suits your life best, but I hope that
knowing about alulos as an option can make your life better.

(25:10):
I haven't been diligent enough yet to run ab tests
with a blood glucose monitor on to see how much
alulos with certain meals blunts my sugar spikes. I am
wearing my monitor right now, but it's kind of hard
to eat one meal without the allulose and then eat
the exact same meal with it. I could maybe make
it work. It could be fun to do. If you
have experience with allulose or more questions about it, or

(25:31):
you want me to talk more about my experiments with
it on a future episode, or if you've tried some
things you think would be helpful for other people to
know about, send me a message at Healthcourage Collective at
gmail dot com. I would be super interested if you'd
like to be part of some kind of community that
exchanges recipes or ideas or tips. Send me a message
and I will see what I can facilitate. We are

(25:53):
all here to help one another enjoy the process of
putting more years lived in good health into our futures.
Next week we're going to talk about making perfect health choices.
Until then, swap out a sweet treat that destroys your
future with one that actually improves your metabolic health and
don't be normal. Thank you so much for tuning into

(26:15):
the Health Courage Collective podcast. I am truly honored that
you have paid me the enormous compliment of your time
and attention. I would be so grateful if you would
share this podcast with someone you know and subscribe so
you never miss an episode. This podcast is for entertainment
and information purposes only. Statements and views on this podcast
are not medical advice. This podcast, including Christina Hackett and producers,

(26:37):
disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse events by use of
information contained here. It If you think you have a
medical problem, consult a licensed Posiions