Is Maple Sugar Healthier than Refined Sugar?

Sugar is sweet. Maple syrup is sweet. What happens to your health when you swap sugar for maple syrup? No one has ever studied that before. Until now.

Maple syrup is more than just another sweet. It also contains several minerals and is rich in polyphenol flavonoids. So, would it have different effects on the body while still sweetening your food?

In the first ever placebo-controlled study of maple syrup, 40 healthy adults from Quebec, where most of the world’s maple syrup is made, who had mild metabolic problems, substituted 2 tablespoons of refined sugar with either real maple syrup or artificially flavoured sucrose syrup for 8 weeks.

People in the maple syrup group had significantly better response to the oral glucose tolerance test, meaning that maple syrup leads to better blood sugar management by your body after eating.

Systolic blood pressure was also significantly lower in the maple syrup group. While it got slightly worse in the sucrose syrup group, it significantly improved in the maple syrup group.

Weight around the middle, called abdominal fat or central obesity, is more of a risk factor to your life than overall fat. This study found that while abdominal fat increased in the sucrose syrup group, it decreased significantly in the maple syrup group.

And one more sweet bonus: maple syrup increased the beneficial bacteria in the gut and decreased the harmful bacteria.

The researchers concluded that maple syrup can reduce cardiometabolic risk factors that are involved in diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The Journal of Nutrition. October 2024;154(10):2963-75.

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