Three coffees. Three packets.

That was my week. Every morning I made a cup of plain black coffee and stirred in two packets of one sweetener. Nothing else. No breakfast for the next two hours.

Monday was monk fruit. Tuesday was stevia. Wednesday was allulose.

Then I watched my glucose monitor. That's the small sensor on the back of my arm that checks my blood sugar every few minutes, day and night.

Why these three? All three are sold as zero sugar. And allulose is having a big year. It's in keto ice cream, protein bars and coffee syrups. Some people online have started calling allulose a “natural Ozempic.”

That's a bold nickname.

But there is a real question behind it. Researchers at Germany's Max Rubner Institute published a study plan this year to compare allulose with aspartame. They want to measure GLP-1, the hormone that helps you feel full. Drugs like Ozempic copy that same hormone. In other words, scientists are checking whether allulose gives your body a small nudge in the same direction. The answer isn't in yet... so for now, the nickname is a hope, not a fact.

So make your guess before you scroll. Which sweetener raised my blood sugar the most?

● The Reveal

The stevia won. By a hair.

Six points is tiny. My glucose monitor can drift a few points on its own, so a rise this small is close to background noise.

But the reason the stevia packets won is interesting.

Pure stevia extract has no sugar in it. It's hundreds of times sweeter than table sugar, so each packet needs only a pinch. The rest of the packet is filler, added so it pours like sugar.

And the filler in the packets I grabbed was dextrose. Dextrose is plain glucose, the same sugar your blood carries. In other words, my zero-sugar stevia packets had a little real sugar inside... less than a gram each, according to the box.

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

The monk fruit blend played the same game with a different filler. Most monk fruit sweeteners in stores are almost all erythritol or allulose by weight, with only a speck of monk fruit. Erythritol barely moves blood sugar, which is why that packet raised mine just 3 points.

Allulose barely moved at all.

That matches the research. A 2026 review in the journal Gaceta Médica de México pooled 12 trials. Allulose lowered blood sugar by about 4 points, but only in trials that compared it against fast-digesting, high-sugar foods. Against slower foods, it made no difference. The studies are small, but they point the same way.

● The Scoreboard

For a sense of scale, table sugar scores about 65 on the University of Sydney's glycemic index scale. Pure glucose is 100. All three of these sweeteners sit near zero.

● The Swap

So here's the thing. None of these three sweeteners will move your blood sugar much. The bigger surprise is what else is in the packet.

Flip the box over before you buy. If you see dextrose or maltodextrin near the top of the ingredient list, that's a fast-digesting sugar or starch used as filler. Pick liquid stevia drops, pure stevia extract, or a monk fruit blend made with allulose instead.

For my own coffee, I'm sticking with allulose.

My wife tried all three too. She also voted for allulose. She said the monk fruit blend left a cool, minty feeling on her tongue, which is the erythritol talking.

Will your glucose monitor show the same thing? I don't know. Three mornings on one person proves very little. But the label lesson holds no matter whose arm the sensor is on.

Stay steady