It’s $6.50 AUD for 250gm (about 1 cup).

Thanks for a great site – it’s very informative. I was trying to find information on the nutritional properties of coconut sugar.

You say you’re diabetic, that means you need to regulate your glucose intake then you take 200 calories of coco sugar to prove what?

A prudent diabetic (or a health-conscious person) will not consume 200 calories in one sitting. Your blood sugar, whether your’e diabetic or not will definitely shoot up if you consume that much.

The glycemic response of edible foods and beverages are not dependent on their calorie count. Zero-calorie and zero-carb food can elicit high insulin levels and affect blood glucose concentration during the digestion process.

And truthfully, I would hate for anyone to eat 200 calories of coconut sugar on a fast! That would spike most people’s blood sugar. By the way, if you eat fat with sugar you will generally lower the glycemic load of sugar. Also, in Nourishing Traditions, Sally mentioned a study where they found that people responded to different sweeteners differently. Some people will spike more with certain sweeteners….for no apparent reason. So everyone, know that you may do better with certain sweeteners.

I can’t tell you whether there are refined sugars added. The jar does say “Ingredients: Palm Sugar 100%”, but as you wrote, the can has very little English on it, so it is hard to know for sure.

Ironically, I asked my mother to look for coconut or palm sugar in a large Asian market where she lives and she was unable to find it at all. She did find the hard sugar lumps and a Vietnamese friend also gave some to her and told her that it can be melted in the microwave. After she went to several stores and still came up empty-handed, I ended up finding my two jar/cans at a small Korean market in my relatively small town!

There’s no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to sugar; less is always better, no matter what the sugar source, no matter how “traditional”, no matter how unrefined. It doesn’t matter if we are thick or thin, more than tiny amounts of sugar are problematic. Our biochemistry and physiology was determined over millions of years when there were few sources of readily and steadily available concentrated sugars, so we can’t handle very much without slowly developing health issues. Historically, concentrated sugar was relatively scarce and costly. Once the supply grew ample and cheap (19th century-20th century) concentrated sugars really turned deadly on an increasingly massive scale. This isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s just on a much larger scale than ever seen before.

There is simply too much glucose and fructose in concentrated sugars for the modest amount of other nutrients that accompany sugars (in other words, sugars aren’t where we should be looking for our minerals and vitamins). Concentrated sugars (of any sort, including honey, coconut/palm sugar, date sugar, maple syrup, cane sugar, beet sugar, fruit juice concentrates, etc.) need to kept to very small, very, infrequent doses. Check out the University of California TV seminar by Dr. Lustig for a great presentation on sugar – Sugar: The Bitter Truth (www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM). He refers to fructose a lot, but he makes clear that sucrose and HFCS (both approx half fructose) are both equally awful in biochemical pathways. Fructose is indeed the sneakier part of the sugar equation, though, but is never mentioned or quantified on nutrition labels.

Lynn 06.18.09 at 1:05 pm and Marissa 08.19.09 at 3:07 pm also commented with similar concerns. Glad to see that.

Sucrose is a disaccharide (two molecule sugar) made of one molecule glucose bound to one molecule fructose. So the small % listed as glucose and fructose in coconut sugar are unbound molecules and they don’t take into account the glucose and fructose that make up the sucrose.

Be skeptical of those Glycemic Index/Glycemic Load claims – those glycemic studies are based on young, seemingly healthy subjects and the results may not be applicable to anyone who is older, has impaired glucose tolerance (like me) or diabetes. It also makes a difference what else is eaten with the sugars. Fats slow down the rate of sugar entering the blood, but then the insulin promotes storing the fat instead of burning it.

And ultimately, all the carbs (including sugars), except indigestible fibers) you ingest have to be metabolized and processed, regardless of how slow or fast they hit the bloodstream. If it’s glucose, that means insulin needs to be made to push the glucose into cells; it’s fructose, the liver has to convert it to glycogen (if the stores are depleted by intense physical activity) or into triglycerides (fat). The body works very hard to maintain BG levels at about 1 teaspoon of glucose (about 4 grams) at all times even if that means non-stop insulin production), so unless you are burning through the sugar at a fast rate, anything more than what is immediately needed is toxic to the cells and EXCESS, and will be converted to fat. Fructose (as in sucrose and concentrated fructose sweeteners) beyond the modest amount of fructose consumed in a few pieces of whole fresh fruit is just a train wreck in the liver eventually (NAFLD).

Now after all this dumping on sugar, yes, I have some sugar in my house. Grade B maple syrup (least fructose content I can find in a sugar, so far); raw local honey, fridge, and a jar of coconut sugar in the fridge. But that one jar (the thick, gluey kind from the Asian store) has been there at least 6 months, probably longer, that’s how often I use it. The honey takes forever to use up, and the maples syrup is used rather slowly, too (1 quart purchased perhaps 2-3 times per year). I buy more granulated sugar for the hummingbird feeder each year than I do for our family (maybe 2-3 pounds granulated sugar for us, and mostly that’s used when I have company and need to make sweeter things for them). We eat only chocolate that is at least 70% cocoa solids, and that’s probably our major form of sugar intake, other than some fresh fruit. I’m quite sure our entire family eats far less than one third the sugar (from all sources) of the national average per capita intake of about 150 pounds.

So I’m not really anti-sugar; I just recognize that the healthiness or unhealthiness of sugar is far less about the source, the GI #, or the refinement level of sugars and a lot more about the amount and the frequency of intake. Low and infrequent is always better and we don’t seem to miss it, though that took a while.

We are a culture addicted to sweet and we rationalize our sugar consumption in numerous ways.