Sweet tea, two ways.

My wife grew up in a house where the sweet tea pitcher never ran dry. Her family makes it with a lot of sugar and no apologies.

Last week I made her family's recipe twice.

The first glass had three tablespoons of white sugar. The second glass had pure monk fruit extract, added until both glasses tasted equally sweet.

I drank them on two different mornings, with my glucose monitor on my arm. A glucose monitor is a small sensor that checks your blood sugar every few minutes, all day long.

Here's how much the monk fruit glass raised my blood sugar.

This is one person's experiment, not medical advice. Everyone's body responds differently.

Four points. That's it.

And the sugar glass? That one raised my blood sugar about 62 points.

My wife tasted both and said the monk fruit tea had a funny aftertaste. She's not wrong... it finishes a little like a cough drop. But I'll take a strange aftertaste over a 62-point climb.

● The Science

So why does monk fruit barely move blood sugar?

Monk fruit is a small green melon that grows in one region of southern China. Its sweet taste doesn't come from sugar. The sweet taste comes from plant compounds called mogrosides, which are 200 to 300 times sweeter than table sugar.

In other words, your tongue tastes something sweet, but your body doesn't turn mogrosides into blood sugar. So there's nothing there to raise your number.

Table sugar works differently. The University of Sydney's glycemic index database puts table sugar around 65, on a scale where pure glucose is 100. That's why the sugar glass climbed so fast.

The research mostly agrees with my glucose monitor. A 2025 review in the journal Nutrients looked at five small trials. Drinks sweetened with monk fruit raised blood sugar less than drinks sweetened with sugar.

But here's the thing...

A 2017 study gave ten healthy men one sweetened drink, then tracked their blood sugar with glucose monitors for a full day. Swapping that one sugary drink for monk fruit didn't change their 24-hour numbers in a meaningful way.

That's interesting. One swap helps the hour after you drink it. It may not change your whole day.

The studies here are small, and most were done in healthy young people. So I hold all of this loosely.

● Meanwhile… The Hack

Meanwhile, the sweetener aisle is getting crowded.

An industry report this spring said sales of products sweetened with monk fruit jumped almost 24% in 2025. The report tied part of that growth to GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, which have millions of people looking for sweetness without the sugar.

A monk fruit brand sponsored that report, so take the cheering with a grain of salt.

But the same report pointed to a newer trend. Brands are now mixing monk fruit with cane sugar, coconut sugar and date sugar.

So a bag can say "monk fruit" in big letters on the front... and still have real sugar inside.

I tested one of those blends in my sweet tea too. First, here's the gap between plain sugar and pure monk fruit.

And here's the monk fruit and cane sugar blend, next to pure monk fruit.

The blend raised my blood sugar about 18 points. That's far better than plain sugar, because you use less of the blend to get the same sweetness. But it's not the near-zero I expected from a bag with a monk fruit on the front.

So I checked the bag twice. Cane sugar was the second ingredient, right after the monk fruit.

It's a label problem. The fix takes ten seconds.

● The Bigger Picture

By the way, monk fruit blends aren't the only "better sugar" in that aisle.

I tried two more popular sugars in the sweet tea recipe, matched for sweetness. Here's how much each one raised my blood sugar.

Coconut sugar and date sugar are still sugar. My body treated both of them almost like the white stuff.

Could it be that simple? Keep the sweet tea, and change what goes in it?

For me, mostly yes. We don't have to give up the sweet things we love. We just have to know what's inside the bag.

Anyway... my wife still makes the sugar version on Sundays. I've stopped trying to win that argument.

Stay steady