Benefits of and Baking With Fructose

Before you look for an easy solution and start popping Phentermine, it’s important to take a good look at your diet, and see what kind of adjustments you can be making.

I’d like to start with analyzing your daily sugar intake.

We already know the role that sugar plays in impeding weight loss and helping you to drop weight, but there’s a whole other story in baking.  Sugar provides moisture and tenderness, liquefies when it bakes, increases the shelf-life of finished products, caramelizes at high temperatures, and of course, adds sweetness.  Refined sugar, whether from sugar beets or sugar cane, helps cookies spread during baking, allowing their crisp texture, too, and therefore, bakers can’t simply replace sugar with a different sweetener. Though in many recipes, you can decrease the amount of sugar by up to one third without affecting the quality of the product.

Fructose, aka fruit sugar, tastes and looks like cane sugar, and is about one and a third times as sweet as cane sugar. Fructose is also a refined product and, as such, it should be used with wisdom, but what is great about fructose is that it is metabolized somewhat differently to refined cane sugar.  You see, unlike cane sugar, fructose does not cross over directly from the intestines into the blood stream. It is released slowly into the blood via the liver so it does not cause wild surges in the blood sugar levels, along with the drastic secretions of insulin and adrenalin that the body triggers in order to deal with those wild surges.  So fructose is kinder to the pancreas and to the adrenal glands and, under normal circumstances, will not cause the same problems as refined sugar causes.  Provided it is not used in excess, fructose is ideal for sweetening drinks, for sprinkling over fruit salads, and for baking. While fructose is more expensive than refined sugar, those who value their health have come to realize that fructose is a far better alternative – one that could prove to be far cheaper in the long run.  If you want to bake with fructose, use 2/3 cup for every cup of sugar in your recipe and you’ll soon see the results in helping you lose weight but still enjoy treats.