Is sugar as evil as everybody says? Are any of the 7,156 non-sugar sweeteners on the market actually safe to consume? Lucky you found this article because the answers to these and more questions will become self-evident after a quick word from our sponsor.

Err…where’d that sponsor go? Never mind.

A sugar substitute can be natural or synthetic. It tries to duplicate the taste of sugar but has less food energy and fewer calories.

What can you really do with sweeteners that aren’t sugar? Apparently have problems baking. The following research was conducted at Consumer Reports. If you want a non-sugar sweetener for your tea or lemonade but hate the bitter aftertaste, best to go with fructose, which is the kind of sugar found in fruit and honey. It also gave better results than other sweeteners in baked goods but provided almost as many calories as sugar at five times the cost.

In lemonade, aspartame left no artificial aftertaste, while sucralose was definitely a little bitter. But unless you want three legged children, you might want to research further the possible adverse side effects of two of the oldest sweeteners, aspartame and saccharin.

Aspartame also tended to leave a baked cake flat, hard, dense, and not very sweet. Yummy. Not.

Stevia is the new kid on the block. Extracts of this herb claim to be 300 times sweeter than sugar. While widely used in Japan and Canada, it has been slower to catch on in the United States outside the carb-control diet crowd. It is also popular with diabetics due to its negligible effect on blood glucose.

Which leads us back to sugar. Here’s a nice little article contrasting the various forms of sugar. Does your head hurt yet? Here’s an idea to solve the problem once and for all. Get down to local urgent care clinic and have your sweet gland removed.

Welcome back! Get your Online Personal Training account for just $29.99 a year. Follow us on Twitter for diet and workout tips!