A couple of days ago I was catching up with last Sunday’s Dragon’s Den. For the non-Brits out there, this is a show in which entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to a panel of ‘dragons’ – i.e. successful business people – to get an investment of money and, perhaps more importantly, expertise and contacts. It’s a great show that’s been running for quite a few years now and has resulted in a number of products and brands becoming household names – in the UK anyway.

Linus Gorpe on BBC’s Dragon’s Den

The last entrepreneur to pitch in the show was the founder of the Raw Chocolate Company, an interesting character called Linus Gorpe (quote: “I love life. Life is the dance for me. I play a lot. I play in the woods. I eat a lot of healthy food. I love clean living. I love women, oh I love women.” Ahem).

He was promoting his ‘raw’ chocolate products. The Dragons asked what he meant by raw: he said something about heating up apples for two hours in an oven. I don’t think anyone was much the wiser. But I’m not going to pick holes in the ideas behind raw food diets (Science Based Medicine wrote a great article on that topic a little while back, I urge you to check it out).

No, I was more bothered by this little exchange:

Deborah Meaden: “So, the sugar content when comparing it to other chocolate. Same?”
Linus: “No. I use coconut palm sugar, which is um, not refined white sugar. It’s the sugar that’s been made from-”
DM (interrupting): “That’s interesting, so it’s unrefined?”
LG: “It’s unrefined. It’s boiled. So it doesn’t raise your blood sugar levels.”

Peter Jones chimed in at this point on something else entirely, leaving me shouting pointlessly at the telly. Not least because hadn’t he just said heating food was basically bad? And now he’s talking about boiling?!

Sucrose

But that’s the least of my problems with this. Firstly, what is the difference between refined sugar and unrefined sugar? As the name suggests it’s really just a question of processing. Somehow the word ‘refined’ seems to have become irrevocably linked in people’s minds with ‘horribly unhealthy’ whereas ‘raw sugar’ somehow sounds much better. In reality, in the case of cane sugar (for the sake of comparing like with like), all the ‘refined’ bit means is that any non-sugar ingredients, which mainly provide flavour and colour, have been removed and the water has been rapidly evaporated from the sugar solution to produce fine, white crystals of pure sucrose.

Raw sugar, before the refining process, is still mostly sucrose. And truly raw sugar syrup, i.e. completely unprocessed, doesn’t often work very well as an ingredient. So when people talk about ‘unrefined’ sugar, what they usually mean is ‘a bit less refined’ sugar.

Ah, I hear you say, but he didn’t say cane sugar. He said coconut palm sugar. Yes, he did. So what’s that, then?

Coconut palm sugar, or just coconut sugar, is sugar produced from the sap of the cut flower buds of the coconut palm plant. It is usually less refined than cane sugar: essentially the syrup is harvested from the plant and then simply heated to remove the excess water. It’s a pretty simple process.

But does that make it any healthier? What does it actually contain?

Fructose

Glucose

Well, coconut palm sugar is, guess what, about 80% sucrose. The remaining 20% is made up of a mixture of glucose and fructose. Both of which are also sugars. In fact, if you have a look at the images I’ve inserted here, they’re very similar molecules. Chemists describe them as isomers; they have the same number and types of atoms, just arranged slightly differently. If you’ve really been paying attention, you might notice that sucrose is, in fact, just a glucose molecule joined up with a fructose molecule.

When you eat sucrose, your body breaks it down into glucose and fructose. So practically, consuming any of these will have basically the same result, which is to raise your blood sugar. Pure glucose causes the biggest spike, because your body doesn’t have to do anything very much at all in the way of digestion, but just to make this absolutely clear: table sugar is not glucose. It is sucrose.

How much your blood sugar rises when you eat mostly depends on what else is in the food. A whole piece of fruit, for example, also contains a lot of fibre. That fibre slows down digestion, which means the sugar (there’s a lot of fructose in fruit) is absorbed more slowly than if you, say, swallowed a teaspoon of the same sugar on its own.

Coconut palm sugar

In short, refined sugar raises your blood sugar levels. But so does unrefined/raw/partially-refined/whatever-we’re-calling-it-today sugar. It was frankly flat-out incorrect of Linus to state that coconut palm sugar doesn’t raise blood sugar levels, because it does.

There is a bit of debate around how much it raises blood sugar levels. One oft-quoted study (consisting of a grand total of ten participants, and carried out by the Philippine Food and Nutrition Research Institute – incidentally the Philippines is one of the world’s largest producers of coconut palm sugar) quoted a glycemic index (GI) for coconut sugar of about 35, which would compare quite favourably with table sugar (about 58) and pure glucose (100, by definition).

On the other hand, hunt around a bit and another source pops up quoting a GI of 54 for coconut sugar. Which is… about the same as table sugar (and given the chemical make-up of coconut sugar, it’s hard to think of a good reason why they should be very different).

The truth is, there isn’t any such thing as ‘healthy’ sugar, certainly not in the way we talk about ‘healthy fats‘. If you’re going to eat products made with sugar, any sugar, you have to accept that while they may be jolly tasty (that ought to be a give-away, really) they’re treats, and should probably still be enjoyed only in moderation.

I’m sure that the Raw Chocolate Company’s products are delicious, and I’m not particularly anti-sugar. But let’s not be misleading. If someone genuinely cares, for whatever reason, about the sugar in their food, it’s important they get accurate information. Saying things like “it doesn’t raise your blood sugar” is, well, frankly a bit naughty.

The dragons know their stuff, and Deborah Meaden (who eventually invested) is a very smart lady. There’s no way she’ll allow any inaccurate, or even questionable, claims to persist in the long term, so I daresay this is the last time we’ll hear the blood sugar thing in relation to these products. But still, if he’d quoted dubious sales figures they’d have been all over it. Grrr.

—

About this time last year I wrote a post about a company claiming that their agave-sweetened products are ‘sugar-free’. They’re still out there. They still say their products are sugar-free (although they are making some that are sweetened with the sweetener xylitol now, which they’ve bizarrely chosen to label ‘no added sugar’). Their products still do, in fact, contain sugar. Sigh.