Is Agave Nectar Better Than Sugar?
Is Agave Nectar Good For You?
Is Agave Nectar Safe For Diabetics?
No! Agave Is Not Healthy!
Agave Nectar is highly concentrated fructose.
Now, many readers may believe that since fructose is fruit sugar, it is “healthy sugar”. It isn’t. Refined fructose is no better than refined glucose.
Consuming fructose naturally from whole foods is different from consuming concentrated agave. In its natural state, fructose is part of a whole food which includes enzymes, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. But refined sugars, sugars that have been stripped of their nutrition through processing, are never healthy.
Refined fructose lowers circulating insulin and leptin levels and raises ghrelin levels after the meal. Since leptin and insulin decrease appetite and ghrelin increases appetite, some researchers suspect that eating large amounts of fructose increases the likelihood of weight gain.
Refined fructose puts an enormous strain on the liver. Dr. Meira Field says, “;…the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose.”
Large amounts of fructose in the diet rapidly turn into fatty acids, which are stored as fat or released into the bloodstream as triglycerides. These fatty triglycerides are insulin resistant and cause a host of problems. Overwhelming the liver and producing insulin resistant fatty triglycerides is the road to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases.
This is another example of marketing magic. Agave is sold as the healthy alternative to refined sugar. But it is refined sugar. Avoid it like you avoid white table sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
Good alternatives for sugar are stevia, raw honey, date sugar, or sugar cane juice. To understand more about sugar, please read Healthy Sugar Alternatives.