Sunday. Sweet tea.

My wife made a big pitcher of iced tea for the porch. Southern style. A tall glass had about as much sugar as a can of soda.

I drank one glass while wearing my glucose monitor. That’s a small sensor on the back of my arm that reads my blood sugar all day.

That one glass of sweet tea raised my blood sugar about 68 points in under an hour.

And then came the drop. About two hours after the tea, my blood sugar fell below where it started. I felt tired and cranky. I wanted a snack.

That drop is the crash. It’s the part nobody prints on the label.

So this week we’re fixing it. Not by giving up sweet things... by swapping the sugar.

● The Test

Here’s the thing about table sugar. The University of Sydney’s glycemic index database puts it around 65. In other words, sugar gets into your blood fast. Not as fast as pure glucose, but close.

So last week I made the same pitcher of tea twice. Once with sugar. Once with a monk fruit sweetener.

Monk fruit is a small green melon from southern China. Its sweet taste comes from natural compounds called mogrosides, not from sugar. In other words, your tongue tastes something sweet, but your blood gets almost no sugar from it.

Could it be that simple?

The monk fruit tea raised my blood sugar about 6 points. That’s barely more than a glass of water. And with no big rise, there was no crash two hours later.

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

But a new trial points the same way. Last month, researchers published a study in the Journal of Nutrition. Adults drank a stevia-sweetened drink on one day and plain water on another. The stevia drink moved blood sugar and insulin the same as the water did. That held for people at a normal weight, people with overweight, and people with type 2 diabetes.

It’s revealing. The sweet taste alone did not raise blood sugar.

● How the Swap Works

Here’s the good news. You don’t need a pantry full of new products to do this. One bag of a good sweetener covers most of what we sweeten at home.

But not every swap works. Some “sugar-free” foods still raise blood sugar. Here’s how I do it.

Allulose has one more trick. A 2023 review of studies in PLOS ONE found that 5 to 10 grams of allulose eaten with a meal lowered the rise in blood sugar after that meal. The studies are small, but they point the same way.

● Dos & Don’ts

● A Confession

By the way... my first batch of allulose cookies was a disaster.

I baked them at my usual temperature. They came out dark brown on the outside and raw in the middle. My kids ate them anyway. Kids will eat anything with chocolate chips in it.

The second batch came out much better. I dropped the oven 25 degrees.

And here’s what surprised me. A swapped cookie still raised my blood sugar. Less than before, but it did. The flour in the cookie was the reason. In other words, the sweetener swap fixes the sugar part of a treat. It doesn’t fix the flour.

One more thing. The long-term research on sweeteners is still messy. An August review of 23 trials on sucralose, the sweetener in Splenda, found mixed results for blood sugar control. Some studies saw a small downside. Others saw nothing.

I don’t know where the science will settle. We’ll see.

So my plan is simple. We use the sweeteners with the cleanest track record. We use them where sugar raises blood sugar the most, which is in drinks. And we keep reading the new studies as they come out.

On Friday, we’ll dig into erythritol and the scary headlines about it.

Stay steady