Theresa Albert is a nutritionist, best-selling cookbook author, and Food Network personality, and we're thrilled to have her with us for the next few weeks to provide her unique brand of cooking and nutritional knowledge. Humans are designed to love sweetness, and with good reason! When we were cavemen, there were no farms or grocery stores, so we foraged for food.  Generally, the foods that were on the sweet side, like nuts, berries, seeds, and herbs, were safe and nutritious.  Mother’s milk is crazy sweet, specifically to cater to the newborn’s palate.  Sweet is good. But too sweet with nothing else to offer is not so good. We get into trouble when we refine sweetness, whether it’s high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), sugar or artificial sweeteners. Our bodies don’t seem to know what to do with that sweet taste when it comes without the nutrients or calories it is expecting the sweetness to come with.  Consume straight up sweetness in HFCS or sugar and your body overproduces insulin to deal with it.  When we don’t actually use the insulin, the crash that ensues happens because the body is unable to handle the traffic. The studies on artificial sweeteners seem to show a similar but opposite response. It appears as though we hold on to the sensation of sweet and drive toward the calories we expect to come with it.  So we when we taste sweet the body expects to put out some insulin to move fuel into the cells. But when the calories aren’t forthcoming, we biologically seek out even more food.  Pretty smart bodies. There has never been a culture that expects or consumes more sweetness than ours in our time. It starts early in the morning and goes on all day. Most are becoming aware of the issue but are still grappling with the problem. I am often asked how much sugar we really need in our diets - and the answer? None!  Zero, zilch.  Human bodies do a great job of “refining” our own sugars from foods, specifically and most simply from carbohydrates.  In a perfect world, the sugar you need in your bloodstream comes with the fibre, calories and nutrients of food. There has been no upper limit set by either Health Canada or the World Health Organization but they do make a recommendation. The recommendation is that we should consume no more than 10% of our calories from “added” sugar.  And by “added” sugar we mean sugar that doesn’t occur naturally as in fruit. That’s one can of soda pop, or a couple of cookies or one serving of sweetened cereal.  In short, it isn’t much.  By the end of a seemingly perfectly healthy breakfast of sweetened yogurt and packaged granola, one could have 15% or more. That doesn’t leave any room for your afternoon coffee with sugar or your treat for dessert! (see my blog and podcast about breakfast here) One of the ways I suggest we get around this is to switch to honey, agave nectar, molasses or maple syrup to sweeten. So, that morning yogurt becomes the plain variety with a titch of honey and cinnamon which adds flavor, sweetness and nutrients rather than the refined sugar that comes with the prepackaged, pre-sweetened stuff.  Honey is great in tea, and maple syrup is awesome in coffee. These natural sweeteners register lower on the glycemic index (a measurement of how quickly sugar is burned in the body; lower and slower is better) since they still contain other nutrients and minerals and are less refined.  Making this small step toward reducing one’s need for sweet can help the overall picture.