They really like allulose

(Bob M) #1

Multiple experts discuss allulose. They like it:

I like it also, but don’t use it as much as I used to. I’ve had to begin taking a drug that lowers glucose (not for that reason, though), but I’m finding that taking allulose can make my blood sugar too low.

I still use it whenever I want something sweet, just not nearly as much as I did when I first started using it.

They say they don’t see an insulin response; if taken with food, even with sugar, it reduces postprandial (after eating) blood sugar; and it causes release of GLP-1, which lowers appetite.

#2

I never will try it as it’s so expensive I rather don’t sweeten anything ever again :smiley: What does it taste/feel like?
The appetite lowering effect surely wouldn’t help me at all so no big loss. I mostly avoid sweeteners anyway since I first tried out carnivore.
But I am still curious what it is like. Does it have haters just like every other sweetener? This far, I only could eat erythritol (sweet, not tasty, bad if too much) and xylitol (way tastier than normal sugar, tastes like glucose, no problem at all), all the other sweeteners this far had a bad aftertaste (and stevia isn’t even as sweet as it “should be” for my SO and I). Except maltitol, that is pretty much tasteless to me (a bit sweetish, about 20% of erythritol sweetness power) and it has its disadvantages as it’s known.
So, where is allulose? Probably hard to say as we are all different but still, can you tell anything about it?

Or if we want to talk about the effect, where is it compared to others? Other sweeteners shouldn’t raise blood sugar either… Xylitol is good for the teeth but kills dogs and it has some net carbs at least… It’s still my fav sweetener, I just almost never use it for myself. No need.

(Bob M) #3

To me, erythritol and I don’t get along. I don’t have problems with allulose, unless I eat too much of it. Maltitol and I really, really, really don’t get along.

I find allulose is very similar to sugar in a lot of ways, including the ability to make ice cream pretty soft, and it caramelizes similar to sugar. It doesn’t have an aftertaste to me.

As for price, sugar is way cheaper. But since I don’t eat many sweet things, allulose is not that expensive.

Some of the other sugars do raise insulin and have negative effects on the biome. Allulose doesn’t seem to have those effects.

There are 400+ studies using allulose, supposedly. They think it’s safe, though it’s not approved in Europe yet.

(B Creighton) #4

Allulose is essentially a fructose molecule with one of the hydroxyl groups switched. Because of this, it can bind to the same receptors as other sugars, but cannot be worked on by the same enzymes… as a consequence it can actually act to lower your blood sugar, as it blocks off the usual paths of glucose. To me it tastes like table sugar, but officially it’s only 70% as sweet.

Erythritol is plainly not as sweet, and I only use it when it is sprayed with monk fruit extract to give it the same approximate sweetness as table sugar per volume. I like the taste this way just fine.

If you say so. Xylitol is actually good for the mouth biome as the usual bad guys die when they try to eat it. I generally use it in combo with the above, to make it more affordable, although I recently bought probably 15 pounds of it for $3-$4/lb. I have become more cautious with it, and generally would no longer think to use it for baking desserts because of its propensity to cause platelets to stick together.

Most brands are about half as sweet and tasty as the Piping Rock brand I use - of which I really like the taste, and only have to use about 8 drops to sweeten a drink to my liking. Stevia is actually very sweet, but simply gets diluted for $$$ purposes. I like the taste of the versions which eliminate the steviosides in favor of the raubadisides.

(Bob M) #5

This is the one I’m using:

52 cents an ounce, 48 ounces.

For comparison, this real sugar is only 6 cents per ounce:

Considering allulose also is not as sweet, it’s even more expensive.

#6

I use Allulose for the very limited baking we do in our household and have for about 9 months. We don’t stock any other sugars in the house. Normally things like custards, yogurts and frozen treats. I’ve been really pleased with it. For performance, it melts nicely, dissolves nicely, browns, etc. It’s really very close to table sugar in composition.

For the metabolic side, it doesn’t seem to cause any of the munchies that I can get from eating other types of sugar. I don’t feel… any push to continue to eat it. For the first time in my life I can casually eat half a bowl of ice cream then put it in the fridge for later because I’ve lost interest. They say that it may help slow down the rate at which food moves through the system and that rings true for us. It does seem that sensation of being full lasts a lot longer. Just recently I picked up a Stelo (continuous glucose monitor brand) and it shows no response to the Alulose at all for myself or spouse. I’ve done a variety of tests, mostly with creams and custards, that include Allulose and dairy but not other carbs, and there is no movement in my blood sugars at all.

The one drawback, which I consider positive, is that you can make yourself sick eating it. The first night we used it my husband felt sick and threw up a few hours later. What we discovered is that If you add Allulose to a normal sized meal then it’s easy to actually be eating food faster than your body is moving it through the system. Instead of filling up on a big steak and then adding ice cream, the trick is to eat a small steak and fill up on the ice cream. Once you get the hang of it, it makes sense.

I highly recommend it.

(Brian) #7

I kinda got away from all of the alternative sweeteners except one, stevia drops in my coffee in the morning.

I get along with most any of them well enough but my wife really minds allulose. So we don’t generally use it at all. I’m not inclined to make things just for me.

(Mark Rhodes) #8

We have been using allulose since 2019 when @Jennifer_Kleiman introduced me and had a butt load of allulose information on her companies website, now defunct due to unfortunate circumstances. I still think her information was superior in many ways to what is coming out now.
That being said, erythritol remains to granular when cooking. Allulose melts into the butter or chocolate. We don’t use it all that much except around the holidays and I can make many of the traditional dishes with this and not have a major reaction except creating the taste for sweet again.

(Bob M) #9

Is it a one to one replacement for custards? Last year, I made a real custard for Christmas dessert, and I was thinking of trying at least a 50% allulose to sugar replacement, if not 100%. I just don’t know enough about food science to know how allulose works relative to sugar.

The one detriment I’ve found is that having too much of it can be bad. For me, that’s some type of digestive upset. I don’t eat it enough, or weigh anything, to figure out how much of it that causes this, though.

#10

You know, I wish I could be more helpful. Back when I was a 'Carber, I tended towards things like brownies but as I’ve moved towards more animal based I’ve replaced those treats with things similar to traditional custards, etc. That means I don’t have a lot of experience with true custards, just my keto-fied versions. Having said that, the instructions are 1 cup table sugar to 1.25 cup allulose if you want to maintain the same level of sweet and I’ve found that to be a good guide. If you are maintaining a low sweets level though I’d do a 1 for 1 replacement. It will be less sweet and maintain the product consistency. I have very little sweets so If I were doing a test recipe for myself I’d replace 1 cup table sugar with 1/2 cup allulose or it would be unbearably sweet.

(B Creighton) #11

Allulose is a sugar, and basically acts like fructose for cooking purposes. It is basically all a positive metabolically except that being a sugar, it glycates just like sugar, if not moreso. That to me is a big drawback, as it is apparently going to glycate hemoglobin and other proteins throughout the body - including the real stickler for me - the apoB proteins in your LDL… I believe this is the main reason diabetics are so much more prone to heart disease - glycated LDL or gLDL is about 6 times more likely to become oxidized, oxLDL, than native LDL. It is clear that oxidized LDL is linked to heart disease prevalence - https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/53/4/1068/24234/The-Metabolic-Syndrome-Circulating-Oxidized-LDL, and is usually present in cases of metabolic syndrome. So, assuming that allulose freely travels though the blood stream like other sugars, that is its big issue for me, and why I don’t recommend adopting it wholesale like table sugar. It’s probably fine in small amounts - otherwise you are just subsituting a main causal factor of heart disease for another… IMHO of course., since I know of no studies directly on this issue. On the positive side, it’s probably not going to cause you to put on the fat like glucose(through insulin spikes) or fructose, which the liver turns directly into palmitic fatty acid when consumed in larger amounts.

#12

Yes it’s among the weird super sweet ones, all of them seems to be not okay for my SO and I. They are just not nearly as sweet for us as they should be. Like, stevia mixed with xylitol or erythritol (it’s a big thing here), they are mixed in a ratio that they are supposed to be 4 times as sweet as sugar. And we don’t feel it so much sweetener but it’s not normal. We don’t perceive the weird, unnaturally strong sweetness as sweetness, more like some awful taste. Something is there but it’s masked by a very bad taste.
Monk’s fruit was one of the worst things I ever tasted, stevia is a bit better and tricky as it was always awful when I bought it (the leaves are already like that) but I ate chocolate sweetened with stevia and it wasn’t so bad, they can do something well that I can’t just mixing stevia into things. Even if my sweetener mix has 1% stevia and I use a little in a food, I can’t handle it, it’s extremely bad tasting. But I have my own sweeteners so all is well :slight_smile: My fav is lactose as it’s even carnivore and usually comes with some very tasty, fatty thing :smiley:

I don’t know what they are but as I wrote, food industry apparently can do something about it indeed…

I don’t even know sugar prices at this point but I don’t care if my sweetener is 10 times more expensive. Especially now that I almost never consume any. But allulose is crazy expensive. I rather buy some deer with that money… Sweetener isn’t food, isn’t necessary, isn’t even very important most of the time. The caramellization effect is neat though… But my sweeteners make my cookies a lovely color too, it’s enough for me :wink:
(And I can handle even honey here and there so if I want some more expensive - but nothing crazy - sweetener - in a wide sense so something that sweeten things so all sugars are included -, I can buy that. No sweetener is tastier than good honey though I quite like coconut sugar too with its caramel flavor. I don’t have it since years but I have nice memories.)

The sweetness is quite individual. Erythritol is allegedly 70% as sweet as sugar or xylitol but I feel it way sweeter than my SO. I figured it out when I tried to make cake with erythritol instead of xylitol and he complained about the lowered sweetness while it was okay to me. Our sweetness perception was the same back then.

If I could buy a tiny allulose, I would try it out of curiosity…

That has no chance in this household since almost 1.5 decades :smiley: I usually used a quarter of the sweetener amount for the first time. A few months without added sugar and we already felt sweet things WAY sweeter, no matter how much natural sugar we ate, it’s interesting.
But I usually make my own recipes even if I use one as a base. I have my own preferences. If something uses too much sugar or replacement, it’s tough as it is probably needed for the texture but I only know one not really sweet sweetener, maltitol and I won’t use that. Meringue never can be my thing, oh well. Ice cream is doable, too bad I never want it. I still eat it sometimes, it’s useful to use up leftover yolks and cream.

#13

Never knew about blood sugar lowering, haven’t used it in a while but still have some, gotta start that up again. I wound up landing on Monk Fruit, the real one, not the common 90% Erythritol one. It’s something like 1/8th tsp is the sweetness of 1tsp sugar. One small bag is like 450 servings. Looks pricey (bout the same as Allulose) but huge yield on it. I like sweet though, was the key to my protein ice cream, otherwise I was going through a LOT of sweetener, plus freezing things kills sweetness, so you have to account for that. Make it petrifying how much actual sugar real ice cream has.

(KM) #14

Totally agree with all of this. I have grown stevia and when the plant is very young and the leaves are tiny and new, there is very little bitterness but it’s essential to pick the leaves before the plant flowers. I really haven’t found an artificial sweetener that doesn’t have a very unappealing aftertaste or other odd taste sensation and, paradoxically, my senses tend to interpret super sweet as bitter.

#15

I don’t know if I feel that BUT banana becomes many times sweeter when frozen (if it can be called like that, it’s still creamy!!!) and I don’t understand WHY… While I was able to eat the fruit alone (in bigger amounts, even), I needed a lot of unsweetened chocolate to eat a piece of frozen banana as it was too sweet alone. Do other people have this or is it just me? It’s only this one fruit, raspberries stayed not really sweet even frozen… I loved them but the effect where we feel them candy (so many people say they are very very sweet) never came. Their sweetness is mild to me. I feel some dairy items more sweet…

Normal ice cream (as mine is perfectly real) is too sugary and watery for me. It lacks the fat I expect from ice cream, it has unnecessary sweetness and especially sugar… And not even yolk based, inferior stuff :smiley: My ice cream is rich and proper. Too fatty for me, it’s good I don’t desire it ever and my portion is tiny. As it’s so rich and just a dessert in the end of my meal. It doesn’t NEED any sweetener but it’s better with some, yes. I wonder if it will ever change, probably not if I keep eating this much sugar (2024 was fruity, I pretty much neglected carnivore though I did try sometimes and improved my diet in other ways).

(Bob M) #16

I found the vanilla custard recipe I used, which was a great hit two years ago for Christmas. Alas, it uses cornstarch. I think I could replace the sugar with allulose, but I wouldn’t know how to replace the cornstarch. Too bad, because the other ingredients are whole milk, cream, butter, egg yolks. Not too bad as desserts go.

There are 28grams of cornstarch, but it makes 4 cups of custard. (About a liter.) Is 7 grams per cup that bad? I don’t know.

(Robin) #17

I think 7g per cup is completely acceptable, especially since it’s a special ok.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #18

Sweeteners seem a little divisive, such a personal thing.
Zero sweet - Some say.
Sugar - No thanks. I was T2.
Xylitol - No way, deadly for dogs.we have dogs.
Erythritol - Never tried it.
Stevia - I do use a it sometimes and you can grow it in the garden.

#19

I like Erythritol, powdered Swerve is my go to. Allulose is fine although I do not perceive it sweet enough. I use xylitol more as a mouth rinse. I do not like having it in the house because I do have dogs but sometimes I use their sinus rinse drops also. Monk fruit is fine, I am ok with it. Stevia is the one I could never tolerate. I would rather add nothing than Stevia

#20

I agree with @robintemplin that the 7g per cup is a totally reasonable treat especially if you are using the allulose. The information coming in on allulose seems to indicate that if you combine a carb and allulose that the overall effect of the carb is reduced. In other words, sugar alone seems to effect your blood glucose more than the same amount of sugar with allulose added to it.

Is that true? I don’t know. What I do know is that the allulose items I make appear to have no effect based on a CGM. They don’t seem to inspire me to eat more and I’m really satisfied with the taste and texture. Give it a try!