If I eat even two teaspoons of honey a day, my appetite goes berserk and for days I am 24-hour hungry in a way no amount or type of food can satisfy. Agave syrup got me off that treadmill, thank God, but it gets bad press for its fructose content and intense processing.

Am I weird? Does anyone else have this form of carbohydrate intolerance? And does it indicate insulin resistance? How do you know if you’re insulin resistant, anyway? And how do you counteract it?

To obtain agave syrup from agave juice we use similar processes to the ones that regular people use on their kitchen when they cook vegetables or meat.
Cooking our food, like meat and vegetables does not make these foods synthetic or dangerous

Because it cannot be converted to glucose, the liver instead breaks it down and converts it to triglycerides and then dumps it into the blood. This is the infamous “triglycerides” measured in a cholesterol panel – the vast majority of which comes from fructose.

Triglycerides are eventually removed from the bloodstream and stored in adipose tissue. Once stored, they are no longer called triglycerides by anyone except chemists; the rest of the world calls them “fat”.

When the liver has more fructose than it can dump into the bloodstream, it winds up stored in the liver, thus resulting in “fatty liver” which eventually results in insulin resistance.

This is what “metabolic syndrome” is… disordered blood lipids, fatty liver and insulin resistance… which eventually results in diabetes and heart disease. Thus the very stuff once sold to diabetics as “good” because it didn’t raise blood glucose turns out to cause diabetes.

Agave syrup is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than HFCS which is somewhat worse than white table sugar which we’ve known to be pretty bad from the beginning…

As bizarre as it sounds, white sugar is much healthier than agave.

Because I am diabetic, I primarily use stevia as a sweetener. I use the refined kind, but no additives like erthyritol or maltodextrin, etc. It gets used primarily in coffee, in extremely tiny amounts.

But for my family, I primarily use molasses, maple syrup, honey and unrefined cane sugar. I would not be opposed to coconut, date or palm sugar either. IMNSHO, these are not so much healthier because they are less refined or because they contain a smattering of minerals and B-vitamins, but because they have strong tastes and therefore get used in much smaller quantities.

White sugar tastes like NOTHING but sweet. It’s easy to add more and more over time, and we all then become accustomed to very sweetened foods. I remember hitting a mainstream buffet a few years back and nearly gagging on the potato salad cause it was so sweet. Sweet becomes “normal” with white sugar… even in bizarre places like potato salad.

It is much harder to use more and more molasses or maple syrup over time, thus the sweet tooth gets trained to much lower levels of sweetener. No one is REALLY going to overdo molasses… it’s just too strong.

But really, the ideal “sweet” when you want something sweet is simply whole fruit (not juice) – berries, melons, kiwi, apples, pears, peaches… all of which taste AMAZINGLY sweet when you get off the so-called “normal” consumption of sugar.

I make “ice cream” with nothing but frozen fruit and cream in my Vitamax. That might not taste sweet to someone who just ate a Krispy Kreme, but it tastes wonderfully decadent to me.