SUGAR...AH HONEY HONEY

First order of business, I would like to acknowledge the Archies as the the inspiration for the title of this post.

 Now sweets is an area where I have a lot of knowledge. Only thing is, sugar packs a lot calories. If  I eat a lot sweets, it doesn't leave much room for the foods that actually make me feel really good. I don't deny myself sugar, but I've learned lately to limit my intake. In future posts, I'll touch more on some things you can do to limit sugar cravings.

 Now before I go any further, This post is intended for relatively healthy, over-weight people. If you have diabetes, please follow your doctor's orders.

I've found that a lower calorie substitute for sugar is honey. Now, honey doesn't work in all cases. I once tried to make home made ice cream sweetened only with honey and failed miserably. But grapefruit with honey, excellent, peanut butter with honey instead of jelly, fantastic,  honey in your coffee, absolutely, honey on your cereal, yummy. If you like honey, experiment and see where you can replace sugar to buy yourself some extra calories.  Side benefit of honey: Again, this is something I've read but not verified but it makes sense to me. If you eat honey that is produced locally, it will help with allergies that are caused by pollens produced locally.

If you have watched the news lately, you've probably heard about High Fructose Corn Syrup, a cheaper alternative to sugar,  that seems to be in just about everything we like. It seems high fructose corn syrup has taken a lot of the blame for the collective weight gain in the U.S. Until a week ago, I would have thought to myself, that's not right, people are just eating too many calories. It's all about calories in and calories out. But then I read an article by Tara Parker-Pope, of the New York Times.  In the article it stated that two groups of  lab subjects were fed sweeteners. The first group was fed high fructose corn syrup and the second group was fed sugar. Both groups were fed equal calorie amounts of sweeteners. The group that was fed high fructose corn syrup gained weight and the group that was fed sugar, didn't. So if we burn sugar more efficiently than high fructose corn syrup, I'm on board with avoiding high fructose corn syrup at all costs.

This summer I drank a "throw back Mountain Dew",  I think that's what it was called. It even had the old time label on the bottle. It was made with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I couldn't tell any difference from the Mountain Dew of today. But now that I know that I burned off those soda calories faster than I burn off  the soda calories made with high fructose corn syrup, it makes me nostalgic. Nostalgia makes me feel good, and that's what this blog is all about.