What is the diffenence between regular sugar and sugar alcohol?

Question

My grandfather has diabetes and he try's to find stuff to eat with low sugar but if he finds something with like 1 gram of sugar it has 8 or 9 grams of sugar alcohol. Could someone please explain the difference and tell me if the sugar alcohol will make his blood sugar sky rocket the same way regular sugar does. Thanks.

P.S. if anybody knows some good snacks or recipies for people with diabetes that would be great :)

Also...he has Diabetes type 2.

Answer 1

Sugar alcohols are usually incompletely absorbed into the blood stream from the small intestines which generally results in a smaller change in blood glucose than "regular" sugar (sucrose). This property makes them popular sweeteners among diabetics and people on low-carbohydrate diets.

From Wikipedia.

It doesn't change your blood suger level as much as sucrose would.

Answer 2

Check out this link: "What Are Sugar Alcohols?"

http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/whattoe...

Sugar alcohols are all very very different from each other, and will each have very different effects on your blood glucose levels.

Once, purely in the interest of scientific research, I decided to see how my body reacts to different types of sugar alcohols. So I got some regular candy, and then some different types of "sugar-free" candy that was sweetened with different types of sugar alcohols. Over a period of several days, I tried a measured amount of each product, and then recorded my BG levels every 15 minutes for several hours, and compared each sugar alcohol to the baseline regular candy.

What I found was that maltitol was almost as bad as regular sugar -- it raised my BG almost as high, and actually look a little longer than regular sugar to go back down to normal. Lactitol, on the other hand, had no visible effect on my BG -- but it gave me the most painful intestinal cramps and diarrhea I have ever had. No more lactitol for me! Xylitol and sorbitol were both pretty good -- they cause slight rises in BG, but significantly less than either maltitol or sugar. The best one I tried was erythritol: I could detect NO increase in BG at all, and had no unpleasant intestinal effects either.

Anyway, based on that, if I see maltitol or lactitol in a product, I don't eat it at all. (Unfortunately, maltitol seems to be everywhere!) If I see that it has erythritol, I feel safe in discounting those carbs completely.

But different sugar alcohols may (and probably will) affect your grandfather differently, so he shouldn't assume that they will affect him the same way that they affect me.  The only way that he would be sure would be test himself after eating.