The Sweet Truth

Having a son that is a Type 1 Diabetic means that one of my "jobs" is learning about nutrition.  Blissfully ignorant before his diagnosis, now I know the effect of foods on our bodies even if we who are not diabetic cannot immediately see a graph showing the minute by minute impact.  (My son wears a continuous glucose monitor.)  I thought I was a pretty savvy mom when it came to food.  We don't eat out a lot, we cook at home with fresh ingredients.  We always have a salad. We don't drink a lot of soda, and if we do, it is diet.  After his diagnosis, we paid much more attention to portion sizes.

The diet soda is a concession to eating pizza or spaghetti.  It's required.  It's written in the Constitution or the Magna Carta or somewhere that you must have Coke with spaghetti, pizza, oh, and Cincinnati Chili.  Must.  Don't consume artificial sweeteners?  Spare me the lecture.  With T1D, "all bets are off" I was once told.  You do what works.  So in our house, artificial sweeteners may mean you can have an apple and peanut butter with your pancake and (artificial) syrup.  You'd rather have the maple syrup?  Me, too.  But tell a growing boy who is still hungry after that one pancake.

So, thinking I'm smart, I make as a very special treat - Cinnamon Sweet Rolls - but...I use Splenda brown sugar.  Splenda = artificial sugar = lower carb.  Right?  WRONG!  After figuring up the carbs by calculating the amount in each ingredient, I tell my husband how these rolls will be healthier because I used Splenda, less carbs.  How much less, he asks? Good question.

I get out Calorie King app and look up brown sugar.  4 grams = 4 carbs.  I look at the Splenda label.  2 grams = 2 carbs.  BOTH have 1 gram per carb and the same number of sugars.  Only difference?  Per gram, Splenda has more, not less, calories.  I began doing what I should have done before lovingly spreading the weighed Splenda over the buttered dough and cinnamon.  The manufacturers want you to use half of the amount of Splenda as the amount you might have used for brown sugar.  Tricky.  The Splenda is sweeter, gram for gram, so they intend for you to use less.  But, that doesn't work in all recipes. Sweet rolls are made by spreading the sugar over the dough and when rolled, gives a particular appearance.  These rolls were no more healthier than had I used (less expensive) brown sugar.  

I was totally taken in.  

They were, however, by all reviews, delicious with black coffee.