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How will our monk fruit extract impact your blood sugar?

Hi my name is Stefano and I’m the founder of Transparency Foods. I use a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM)... It measures my blood sugar every 5 minutes, and I used it to see how our new monk fruit extract impacted my blood sugar.

Our monk fruit extract is 25X sweeter than sugar, so I added 3 mini scoops to a cup of coffee, which equals a tablespoon worth of sugar sweetness (12 grams).

I waited a few hours and these were the results:

As you can see, my blood sugar stayed pretty much constant. Just so that you understand how powerful this is…

I ran the same test but using a tablespoon of regular sugar instead, and as you can see, this increased my blood sugar by 70 mg/dL:

It took 35 min to peak and 45 min to go to base levels.

I ran both of these tests after a 12 hour fast, and I didn’t move much after having the coffee, just so that I could get the most accurate reading possible.

Going back to the results… This is a big difference, especially if you are like me and you drink a lot of coffee. It can add up very quickly. 

What makes our monk fruit extract special?

Now, the reason our monk fruit extract didn’t spike my blood sugar is that its sweetness doesn’t come from sugar, but instead it comes from natural antioxidants called mogrosides. 

One type of mogroside, called mogroside V, is hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, and of course, contains zero sugars and calories.

This, my friends, is what makes monk fruit special, and our monk fruit extract contain 7% of this wonderful compound.

Note

Something you might want to know is that every monk fruit extract with a Mogroside V concentration of less than 20% requires the use of a carrier, usually maltodextrin, to transform the liquid monk fruit extract into powder. 

We use 10% NON-GMO maltodextrin, which is the best way we have found to make this product.  

Maltodextrin is highly glycemic, but because we only need to add so little monk fruit extract to add sweetness to our drinks and foods, it has virtually no impact on blood sugar levels, as we just saw in the test before. Think of it as eating a couple of tiny crystals of sugar with your coffee. It’s not going to do anything. 

Having said that… Other brands use maltodextrin and don’t disclose it on their product labels. They either don’t know it’s there or they decide not to disclose it.

And we know they contain maltodextrin because (1) we have built relationships with all the major producers of this product, and (2) we have ordered and ran tests on all the competitors’ products. They all tested positive for the presence of starches, and Maltodextrin is the most common starch used as a carrier in these products.

This is a problem, because as a consumer, you are not able to know how much maltodextrin they are using and whether it’s NON-GMO or not. 

Summary

Now, just to bring everything together, our monk fruit extract will not impact your blood sugar levels when used in reasonable quantities. However, if you would rather use a product that’s 100% monk fruit extract, with absolutely no maltodextrin, or any other carriers, I would recommend trying our premium monk fruit extract, which contains 25% Mogroside V and it’s 90x sweeter than sugar. This is launching in a few weeks (by the end of this year - 2024)

And that’s it for this post… At Transparency Foods, we work hard to live up to our name and use what we learn as an industry insider to educate our consumers as much as we can. I hope this was useful, and as always, thank you for reading and for considering our products.