Before I visited the doc yesterday, I measured my blood sugar and discovered it was low at 108 (still not ideal). The night before (i.e., Monday night), I'd had only one evening snack: Anytime candies, which are marketed as sugar-free in Korea. They're honestly good. Maybe a little too good. Here's a look at the front and at the nutrition label:
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| "crisp and relaxing"... "mint flavored" |
Mint flavor works well with sugar alcohols like erythritol, which also has a "cooling" effect inside the mouth. Some keto-heads don't mind it; others complain that it makes erythritol annoying to use in coffee or keto-bread recipes. (Erythritol has lately come under fire for stroke- and heart-attack-related problems as well.)
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| Note: carbs 90 g out of 92 g total, but 87 g sugar alcohol |
Normally, a keto-head can safely discount the carbs in sugar alcohol and calculate net carbs only. If you read Korean and look about two lines above the nutrition information, though, you see the breakdown of the "sugar alcohols" inside Anytime candies. Note the #1 sugar alcohol is maltitol, which isn't considered keto because of its unusually high glycemic index of 52. Table sugar is 65, and erythritol is 0. BochaSweet (which I'm running low on after more than a year) is also 0. Maltitol is often touted as a "low-calorie" alternative to sugar, but instead of acting like its sugar-alcohol brothers, it goes rogue and acts more like regular sugar.
That said, the candies I ate (before I'd looked at the label and done all of the above thinking) didn't spike my blood sugar. Monday night, my blood sugar was looking good at 117. In the morning, I took my meds, waited almost two hours, and got a reading of 108. No blood-sugar spike (or it came and went while I was sleeping).
So while Anytime candies should be treated with caution given all of their maltitol. The other sugar alcohols listed in the above parenthetical include xylitol (GI of 7) and D-sorbitol (GI of about 4). The candy is still 77% maltitol, though, so don't eat fistfuls of it.
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