Xylitol: A Messy, Failed Experiment

• January 27, 2015
• Mari Bickmore
• no comments

With the latest reports on how truly bad sugar is for you, and knowing that high fructose corn syrup is even worse, I was on the search for an alternative sweetener that I can cook with and use for a beverage sweetener.  Something with a low glycemic index and is natural.  I did some light research and went to my Natural Grocer and bought Xylitol (which was touted as natural) and some coconut palm sugar.  I started with the Xylitol.  You can read what xylitol.org says about it…sounds great!

Yesterday I had some lemon left over from a salad dressing I was making, just enough to make about half a glass of lemonade.  Light bulb!  I will try my Xylitol in the lemonade.  Success!  At least I thought.  I truly just had maybe a 1/4 cup of it.  Tasted good, although a bit difficult to dissolve.  Very shortly afterwards I started to have a rumbly tummy.  I remembered reading on the back of the package that diarrhea was a side effect of the product, but thought that it couldn’t happen that soon.  Soon afterwards I had two fairly severe episodes of diarrhea, but still didn’t want to believe that was what caused it.

Move over to today.  I wanted to try the lemonade again to see if the Xylitol worked on a 1:1 measure with sugar. So I made a half gallon pitcher of it.   FYI, it does work that way. The lemonade was good.  I thought it was a miracle, but that didn’t last long.  Shortly after I drank a bit of it the rumbles started again, and then …well you know what happened next.  I don’t think it is a healthy cleanse.  So I got back on my laptop, laying on the couch feeling a bit yucky, and dug a little deeper.  What I found wasn’t very nice. I will continue to try out new options for sweeteners, but will do a little deeper research beforehand.  I am sure everyone will not have the same issues that I did, but buh-bye to this one for me.  Here are a few of the links that I found for xylitol….and you can thank me for being the human guinea pig later.

Scariest:  http://www.naturalnews.com/022986.html

Casual blog, but quotes an organic chemist saying: “Xylitol will rip up your insides, namely the digestive tract.”  http://www.crunchybe…ling-it-natural

This one says it’s processed with heavy metals (a powdered nickel-aluminum alloy):  ttp://www.thehealth…acked-up-to-be/