8 Strategic Sugar Swaps For Brain-Healthier Sweets
Plus, announcing the better-for-you holiday cookies I’ll be revamping!
Hello, everyone. As part of this month’s better baking mini-series, I offered to give one of your recipes a BHK makeover. It’s been fun to go through all the entries and it's really tough to pick a winner. After much deliberation, I have chosen TWO recipes: the Peanut Butter Blossoms (the classic Hershey’s kiss cookie) mentioned by Judy A. And I can’t resist making over Trudy S’s Pistachio Lemon Snowballs. I am getting right to work on these today. I can’t wait to share the final results with you all.
Today, we are talking about cutting back on sugar. If you are just joining us, welcome! This is the third post in our mini-series about brain-healthy ingredient swaps for your holiday baking. To catch up, check out these posts:
How is your holiday baking going? I’d love to hear if any of these swaps worked for you, or if you have any other tips to share.
A few reasons to bake with less sugar
You may be wondering why you’d even want to tinker with a recipe you only enjoy over the holidays. It is totally fine to indulge in treats sometimes! I have a hard time resisting a frosted sugar cookie, especially if shaped like a Christmas tree. Some nostalgic recipes are best left alone. I don’t want to be a Grinch, but eating a sugar-boosted diet throughout the entire holiday season could take a toll on your health. For example:
Ramping up the sugar in your diet can wreak havoc on that stable blood sugar you’ve worked hard to cultivate.
Sugar-sweetened foods can zap energy levels throughout the day. This can be especially detrimental for women experiencing perimenopause, when fluctuating hormones also impair blood glucose regulation.
Eating too much sugar, especially in the evening, can make it hard to sleep at night.
A month of noshing on cookies and treats can work against efforts to maintain a healthy weight. This can be compounded by the busyness of the holidays, which sometimes means missing workouts and getting fewer steps into your day.
Taste buds adapt after a few weeks of indulging on sugary foods and drinks. If you’ve worked hard to train your tastebuds to enjoy foods that are less sweet, you don’t want to go back to an uptick in how you experience sugar.
8 sweet strategies to bake with less sugar
Let’s get this out of the way first: all forms of sugar impact your body pretty much the same. Even “natural” forms of sugar like maple syrup and honey will challenge your body’s insulin response and the resulting spike in blood glucose. My rule of thumb for consuming sugar in any form is that it must be balanced with fiber and protein to slow absorption into the bloodstream.
The white sugar alternatives listed below are more flavorful, so you can get away with using less. And, they offer beneficial nutrients (albeit in small amounts) so are a step above refined white sugar, which provides zero nutritional value.
Sugar provides more than sweetness to a baked good. It gives cookies their shape, allowing them to spread and develop crispy edges. It’s a flavor enhancer, too. And, it binds liquid which keeps cookies and cakes from drying out.
But the good news is this: most of your recipes already have way too much sugar. So you still get all these benefits of sugar even if the amount is cut by 25% or even 50%. Some recipes, like chewy cookies and bars, may even taste better with less sugar. That’s because overwhelming sweetness masks more nuanced flavors like cinnamon, vanilla, chocolate, and the nuttiness of whole grain flours.
Some of your recipes, however, may need a multi-faceted approach: reducing some of the sugar while swapping in naturally sweet whole foods to fill out the flavor profile.
Here are a few strategies to get you started:
