The sweet truth: Coconut, date sugars do have benefits

Two alternative sugars — coconut sugar and date sugar — have been trying to catch my attention lately, cropping up in recipes purporting to be healthier and taking over valuable shelf space at my nearby Whole Foods and health-food stores. These sweeteners have become so widely available, I decided they merited some reconnaissance. Are they really any better for us than the refined white stuff?

Society seems to have conferred a health halo on coconut anything these days, and coconut sugar is no exception. It is derived from the sap of the coconut palm tree, similar to the way maple syrup is derived from the sap of maple trees. Coconut palm sap is boiled down into a syrup that is bottled and sold as well, but it is also crystallized to form a scoopable sugar that’s an easy one-for-one replacement for white sugar in many recipes. Because it is unrefined, it retains its brown color and the minerals present in the original sap.

There isn’t much data on coconut sugar, but one report from the Food and Nutrition Research Institute in the Philippines notes its content of iron, zinc, calcium, potassium and other nutrients. Don’t bust into a happy dance just yet, though, because it’s not much when you put it into perspective. You’d need to eat about 25 teaspoons worth of coconut sugar to get roughly two milligrams each of iron and zinc, for example, the same amount found in a typical portion (six ounces) of roasted chicken. Besides, 25 teaspoons of regular brown sugar (which is white sugar with some molasses added back in) has a little more than one milligram of iron and some zinc as well. Clearly mineral content alone doesn’t justify switching to coconut sugar, especially considering it has roughly the same amount of calories as regular sugar and costs more than $4 a pound compared with about $1 per pound for brown sugar.

The real benefit of coconut sugar is that it doesn’t cause your blood sugar to spike as much as most other sugars do. The University of Sydney pegs coconut sugar as a low-glycemic food, with a glycemic index of 54. Comparatively, quinoa has a GI of 53 and regular sugar has a GI of 65. (The report from the Philippines noted the GI of coconut sugar as 35, a number often quoted online. The discrepancy could be because of methodological differences and individual variation, but since the University of Sydney uses the international standard method and produces extensive GI data used worldwide, I’m going with their value.)

The reason coconut sugar has such a low GI is that it contains inulin, a type of soluble fiber that slows absorption of food in the gut. Inulin also is considered a prebiotic, meaning it is the preferred food for good gut bacteria and may help foster a healthy gut microbiome. Lots of foods contain inulin, such as onions, garlic, leeks, asparagus, and bananas; plus, many packaged foods are supplemented with it, so I wouldn’t opt for coconut sugar for the inulin itself. But if you are trying to prevent spikes in blood sugar and want to avoid artificial sweeteners, coconut sugar might be right for you. Coconut sugar still counts toward the daily added sugar cap of six teaspoons for women and nine teaspoons for men recommended by the American Heart Association.

Date sugar comes from a different type of palm tree — the date palm — and not from the tree’s sap. Rather, it is a granulated form of the tree’s fruit: literally, ground-up dates. (A different kind of sugar is also made from the date palm’s sap. It is marketed as palm sugar — not to be confused with coconut palm sugar — and is commonly used in Southeast Asian cooking. It’s plausible that palm sugar could have many of the same attributes as coconut sugar, but research is scant.)

Because date sugar is simply ground whole dried fruit, it contains all the fruit’s nutrients — vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber — but as with coconut sugar, you’d have to eat a lot of it to get a substantial amount of nutrition. But at 10 calories per teaspoon it is about one-third lower in calories than regular sugar, and its fiber and potassium content is not insignificant, with 1 percent of the daily value of potassium and 2 percent of fiber per teaspoon. That fiber means it also has a low average GI of about 50 (it varies by variety).

Date sugar is made of unrefined fruit, so it is not technically an added sugar. But it is so naturally sweet it can act like one in many recipes. I tried it out in a smoothie and in banana bread, swapping it one for one for regular sugar, and it worked wonderfully in both, although it is considerably less sweet than refined sugar and has a distinctly datelike taste profile that wouldn’t work in every recipe. Also, because it doesn’t melt, it bombed when I tested it out for making caramelized bananas and for sweetening tea. And it’s pricey, at about $12 a pound.