Sugar, Honey, Maple Syrup: Which Sweeteners Are Stone-Safe?

Sugar, honey, maple syrup. Which sweeteners are stone-safe? Let's talk about that.

Welcome back to the Kidney Stone Diet podcast. The show about reducing your kidney stone risk and living your best life. I'm your host and fellow student, Jeff Sarris.

And I'm Jill Harris, your kidney stone prevention nurse.

All righty, so we are back at it. We're talking about sweeteners today. We have maple syrup, we have honey, the natural choices.

We have old-school, just sugar, I mean, which is also natural. But, how does all of this impact kidney stones and kidney stone prevention?

Eating too much of any of these products can increase your risk of kidney stones. And, so people, this is very common. I love that you thought about this topic, Jeff, because the whole honey thing,

"Well, Jill, it's it's natural. It's natural sugar. It's not added sugar.

It's natural. It came out of a bee's butt, so it's good for me." Honey is sugar. Whether it came out of a bee's butt, I'm a city girl.

I don't know where honey comes from a bee. I don't know, so don't even comment on it. But even though it's a natural sugar, just like Jeff said, sugar is a natural thing.

Maple syrup, natural coming from a tree,

It doesn't mean we don't count that into the added sugar portion of the kidney stone diet. Now, why do we care about added sugar anyway? Too much added sugar can do two things.

It can increase urine calcium, which not a lot of people talk about, but it can, and it can also lower urine volume.

Now, we all know that sodium does that. If we eat too much sodium, we bloated up, we can't fit into our dungarees. We know that about sodium because fluids follow sodium.

And then we retain them, and then we don't pee. Well, sugar can do the same thing. You know, I don't eat a lot of sugar, as you can imagine, and so, but when I do have something sweet, and I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but do you notice how thirsty you are?

Like, if you have a slice of cake, you're going to notice it next time, how thirsty you are. You may not, simply because you eat a lot of sugar, typically. I don't.

So, and I know you hate me for saying that, but I'm just telling you what's going on here in Chicago. I don't eat a lot of added sugar because it would bother all my bowel stuff, not because I'm just too goody two shoes, cuz who doesn't love sugar? But when I do eat some sugar, I notice how thirsty I am.

So,

There's that. And when we have too much calcium in our urine, that is definitely a kidney stone risk. And how do you find out if you have too much calcium in your urine?

You get a 24-hour urine collection because up to 60% of kidney stone patients will have that urine abnormality and you don't even know you have it unless you do that urine collection. And yes, I will always harp on that. So,

Maple syrup, honey, table sugar, they can all increase your kidney stone risk if you're overeating it. Now, we always talk about here portion, not perfection. This does not mean that you can't enjoy some ice cream, that you can't enjoy some birthday cake, that you can't enjoy your favorite Italian cookies on Christmas.

That's me. It doesn't mean that. It just means that we have to really

Pay attention to how much sugar we're eating a day. Added sugar. 25 g of added sugar for women, 38 g of added sugar for men.

The American Heart Association also concurs with those goals for each of us. So, if you're just eating sugar here and there,

It doesn't mean you're going to form a kidney stone. But sugar is just not healthy in large amounts for any of us. And if you're diabetic, the glycemic index on these three things goes like this: maple syrup, out of 100, is 54.

Honey

Is 58 to 60 out of 100, and table sugar is 65. That's up to a 100. And that's going to be how fast each of those, in a numeric value, raises your blood sugar.

So, for my beautiful diabetics that are watching this who also form kidney stones, and that combination is very common,

You know, you already know. You're world worlds ahead of people that don't have diabetes as far as controlling your added sugar. So, you know, in my meal plan, I will use a little bit of sugar, okay?

Or sugar-free substitutes. And so people will say, "Well, sugar-free wrecks my gut." Then don't

Use sugar-free. Use a little bit use a little bit less of these regular sugars to make something sweet. "Well, Jill, I can barely taste the sugar now.

It's not as pleasurable." It won't be at first. I'm not here to lie to you. You all have been eating for decades a certain way.

The internet wants to tell you that it's so, so easy to change your lifestyle, and I'm here to tell you, it's not.

And so, I'm not here to make you sad about that. I'm here to be realistic so I can manage your expectations of what changing a lifestyle really is. And when I work with patients one-on-one, we talk a lot about that because what I hear is this: "Well, Jill, I'm a sugar addict, and I tried not eating sugar for a week, and all I did was crave it." It's going to take a minute to lower those cravings.

The longer you go without sugar or lessening sugar, I promise you, I'm not making this up, I promise you, you will crave it less. That's how that goes. One of the reasons I love keto diet and the only reason I like keto diet, cuz it's not good for stone formers, is because it taught us about sugar.

And so when people went on keto, they knew the first thing was low carb, get rid of sugar. And so a lot of people lost weight. But the point is, a lot of people on keto gain that weight back because you can't go for the rest of your life without some sugar, right?

You're going to want to enjoy stuff. So, what I ask my patients to do is we have this set of goals all found at kidneystonediet.com.

That doesn't mean that every day you're going to meet your goals. I would like them met for you to lower your stone risk more days than not, but that doesn't mean that you can't enjoy your favorite foods and then get right back on track right after. Jeff, have you ever have you ever had something,

Whatever it was, maybe you wanted to tone up, maybe you wanted to lose weight, maybe you had an illness, whatever it is. Now, I know personally, I'm so but you can talk to the audience. And you decided, "I want to change my diet." What did you find out about changing your diet and your lifestyle?

And how'd you do it?

Yeah, I mean, everything is just baby steps. I think that's really the big thing. And patience.

And Maybe even patience above the baby steps, I should say. Just because we all want results, we want change instantly. And I think that's, unfortunately, sort of a losing battle, you know?

Like, we can we can then

Rank, maybe, or have a perspective on how well we're doing x, whatever x is, and not actually realizing that we are doing it. We just need to give ourselves sort of the flexibility to understand that time is a is a huge factor on everything that we're doing.

Yeah, I think that's so true. And I think it's actually the number one thing. People want to see results right away.

And the problem is the diet industry is going to say, "If you don't if you want to get rid of your flabby arms in January, you can do that by March." No, you cannot do that by March. And then what happens March 1st? You're like, "Well, it's not for me.

I can't do it. Forget it!" And then you get off whatever you were trying to do.

It is a lot of patience. And we, as a society, don't like that. So, of course, the diet industry is going to say quick and easy all the time, but it's not.

And so, if Jeff and I manage your expectations on what this is, it is being patient, knowing that instead of changing all things at once, but you just focus on baby steps, one thing out of the time, that is what can get you there. There's always like less than 1% of people that will say, "Well,

I'm going to do everything tomorrow." And that is great if you can do that, but you know, 99.99% of you cannot do that. So, manage your expectations, start with the number one goal first, and that's getting your water in, okay? So start with that.

But as far as these sugars,

Maple syrup and honey, although they are, quote, "natural sugars," just like Jeff said, so is table sugar. That's natural, too. But you know darn well, you're you're going to be more afraid to put a lot of teaspoons of sugar in your coffee that then you maybe honey because you think honey is something special.

It's sugar. That's what it is. I can't tell you how many of my patients say, "Well, no, I don't use sugar, Jill.

I use honey." It's sugar! Or,

"Jill, this product is sweetened with honey." It's added sugar. If you look at the ingredients, honey will be listed because they added it. So, that's how this goes.

I'm I'm I'm here to tell you the real story, and so sometimes it's not so happy. But honey, maple syrup is the same thing as sugar, except that maple syrup, as diabetics will know, will have a lower glycemic index.

Honey would be next and table sugar will rise raise your blood sugar the fastest. But just a little bit, folks. We're not talking big giant stretches here, okay?

Yeah.

I think that's it, Jeff.

Yeah, I think that's perfect. I think that's a great spot to wrap. And when you're ready to go all-in and prevent stones, to never have a stone again, head to kidneystonediet.com where there's tons of free resources, including Jill's weekly email newsletter that she sends to your inbox every weekend.

And also, we have meal plans. We have the All-Access Pass that gets you absolutely everything, every tool in the tool belt needed to prevent kidney stones. But, I think with that, we'll wrap and we'll see you next week.

Bye everybody. Thank you.