Rainy Sunday. Two batches of muffins.

My wife had the blueberries out before I finished my coffee. The kids wanted to help, which mostly meant eating the blueberries.

So I turned it into an experiment.

One recipe, two bowls. The first bowl got a cup of plain white sugar. The second got a cup of a monk fruit sweetener from the grocery store, the kind that measures cup for cup like sugar.

Then I ate one muffin from each batch 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, day and night.

Why now? This week, a new study made the rounds in medical news. Researchers followed people for years and found that the ones who drank more sugary drinks got more stomach cancer. People who drank artificially sweetened drinks did not show that same link.

That's one study. It shows a pattern, not proof.

But it has a lot of us looking at the sugar bowl and wondering about the other options. Monk fruit is the one I hear about most. So let's test it.

Here's the sugar muffin first.

The sugar muffin raised my blood sugar about 68 points. It peaked 45 minutes after I ate it. Then, two hours in, my blood sugar dipped below where it started… and I was hunting for a second muffin.

No surprise there.

The University of Sydney's glycemic index database puts table sugar at around 65. In other words, plain sugar gets into your blood fast. And this muffin had white flour too, which also turns into sugar quickly.

Now the monk fruit muffin.

The monk fruit muffin raised my blood sugar about 36 points. That's roughly half as much as the sugar muffin.

Interesting, right? Half… not zero.

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

● The Science

Monk fruit is a small green melon from southern China. Its sweet taste comes from natural compounds called mogrosides. Your body does not break mogrosides down into sugar the way it breaks down table sugar.

In other words, pure monk fruit sweetener barely moves your blood sugar on its own.

The research points that way, though it's small. In one study from the Philippines, twelve young adults drank 50 grams of monk fruit sweetener mixed in water. Their blood sugar did not rise in any meaningful way. White sugar, tested the same way, raised it clearly.

And a review of five small trials found that monk fruit led to a smaller rise in blood sugar after eating than sugar did.

So why did my monk fruit muffin still go up 36 points?

Because of the flour. A muffin is mostly white flour, and white flour turns into sugar in your blood quickly. Swapping the sweetener removed one source of sugar. It didn't remove the other one.

Here's the thing about that bag, too.

I flipped it over. The first ingredient was erythritol, not monk fruit. Many monk fruit blends are almost all erythritol, with a tiny pinch of monk fruit extract mixed in for extra sweetness.

Erythritol is a sugar alcohol. It doesn't raise blood sugar much. But researchers at the Cleveland Clinic gave healthy volunteers a drink with 30 grams of erythritol. Afterward, their platelets, the blood cells that help form clots, clumped together more easily. The same team's earlier work linked high blood levels of erythritol to more heart attacks and strokes.

Those studies were small. They show a link, not proof.

A team in Berlin is testing erythritol in people with prediabetes right now. I don't know where this will end up. We'll see.

For now, I've switched to pure monk fruit extract, which you use in tiny amounts, or a monk fruit blend made with allulose instead of erythritol.

● The Hack: If You Must Use Sugar

Sometimes only the real thing will do. Grandma's banana bread. A birthday cake. That's fine. We don't have to give up the foods we love.

Here's how I keep a sugar bake from raising my blood sugar as much.

● By the Way…

Not every "healthier" sugar is easier on your blood sugar. I baked a few more batches of the same blueberry muffin recipe. Here's how much each one raised mine.

So the lesson? Swapping the sweetener helps. But the flour still counts. And the ingredient list on the back of the bag matters more than the word on the front.

The kids, by the way, couldn't tell the two muffins apart.

My wife could. She said the monk fruit batch had a cool, minty aftertaste. That's the erythritol.

Stay steady