hi my name is dr. C annsofi and I'm a registered dietitian and I'm here today to talk to you about non-nutritive sweeteners or sugar substitutes so many people have diabetes these days that they're looking for ways to cut back on sugar or use more and more sugar-free products and so I thought I would talk to you about how to bake with some of the new products out there and some maybe not so new so the first first of all let's talk about sugar and the function of sugar and cooking the first thing that sugar does is it provides moisture it helps with volume and it helps with that browning and tenderness process and in baking whenever you're baking and so when you take sugar out and substitute artificial sweeteners you've got a totally different product and so you have to learn to work with that now one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that you can actually cut out sugar or baked products by about 1/3 and still have a very very good edible high quality product so that's always the first choice but if you want to go sugar-free all the way there's a couple of products out that I want to talk to you about the first one is this one right here and well actually both of these are a stevia product and stevia is new out on the market it comes from a plan actually related to the sunflower and so this this first one that we have here is stevia in the raw it's just exactly like sugar you use it like sugar except it is about 600 times sweeter than sugar so you don't really need that much so this product if you are just going to substitute this for sugar you would use a much smaller amount and consequently you would have a totally different product because you don't have that volume that tenderness so you've got to add a substitute you've got at a bulking agent if you just use this alone there's another product out that's called a stevia baking blend and that's this product right here you can see it's lighter and finer it makes for a much more tender baked product much more tender cake a little bit there's a little bit of browning action but not much again this is very very sweet so you don't need very much so my recommendation if you use stevia to add a bulking agent either either one of those in experiment a little bit but when we talk about bulking agents we're talking about something to hold moisture in so applesauce 1/3 of a cup of applesauce added or I really like the consistency of pumpkin or any kind of mashed mashed fruit does works really well the other thing that you can use is you can use yogurt and I like Greek yogurt fat-free Greek yogurt again it holds the moisture in and provides a little bit of tenderness then another product that you've heard a lot and by the way both of these don't raise your blood sugar at all they have no effect on blood sugar so because we don't really digest those the other product that's out there is xylitol we find it in gum we find it in a lot of other sweetened products it is it is an alcohol derivative and consequently we don't necessarily digest it but we do digest and metabolize it a small amount of it and you can see it looks very much like sugar it has a good hot you can bake at high temperatures with this and it won't lose its flavor or consistency so it is good to use in baking and however one major caveat is that it will cause your blood sugar to increase if you do have diabetes so although it's not the same as sugar it has the same sweetness of sugar you can substitute this for like if you're using one cup of sugar you'd substitute one cup of this but you need to watch your blood sugar because it will cause it to rise a little and you just need to be really careful with it then um last but not least is sucralose and sucralose is this this is actually a sucralose blend and it is a product we don't digest it some people handle it really well it some people don't some people get stomachaches from it it is fabulous in baking probably of all of the four sweeteners this one is probably the best to use in baking and it doesn't cause your blood sugar to rise at all and so it's an excellent product I would encourage you to experiment with that one enjoy you