Palm Sugar – Cheap, Healthy, Delicious!

I first tasted palm sugar in Thailand, as an almost floral hint of sweetness in my pad thai. I could only compare the aftertaste to caramel, though more complex and nectar-like.

Thai cooking is based on a Chinese concept of incorporating five essential flavors into each dish: pungent or hot, salty, sour, fatty, and sweet. Because palms grow indigenously in Thailand, their sap is a natural choice to sweeten food.

Four years after my travels to Bangkok, walking through Hong Kong Market in Houston, I noticed a large jar of golden paste, labeled “Pure Palm Sugar…Fresh Natural Juice from Coconut Flower.” I have been avoiding refined cane sugar for five years, because of it’s insanely high glycemic index and lack of nutritive value. I’ve learned to cook with honey, molasses, sorghum, brown rice syrup, agave nectar, dehydrated cane juice. But I had never seen palm sugar for sale before. I bought the 4-lb. jar for just over $6.00, and tasted occasional spoonfuls on the drive back to Arkansas (delicious but unwise!).

Once back home I began to research palm sugar and realized that its glycemic index is 35, just over 1/3 the glycemic index of cane sugar (GI 93). This means that if a person sits down to a tablespoon of palm sugar and a tablespoon of white cane sugar, the cane sugar will raise the person’s blood glucose levels to a certain degree, whereas the palm sugar will only raise the glucose levels to about 37% of the cane sugar level.

What great news for anyone concerned about maintaining their glucose levels, including sufferers of diabetes and those who seek to avoid diabetes during their lifetimes.

Because palm sugar breaks down less rapidly than cane sugar, and thus raises the blood glucose to only % of the levels that cane sugar causes, palm sugar demands less insulin in order for the body to maintain homeostasis. Thus, palm sugar taxes the pancreas less than cane sugar. Excessive demand on the pancreas from high glycemic foods exhausts the pancreas’s ability to produce insulin, as well as the insulin receptors’ ability to recognize insulin, and thus leads to Type II Diabetes.

As anyone diagnosed with Type II Diabetes can tell you, putting as little pressure on the pancreas as possible is a wise dietary decision. Because palm sugar puts half as much pressure on the pancreas as white can sugar, we can venture that moderate use of palm sugar is a safe alternative sweetener. By contrast honey has a glycemic index of 83. Maple syrup has a glycemic index of 54.

Agave nectar’s glycemic index ranges between 11 and 30, making it the only lower glycemic sweetener than palm sugar that I can find.

The relatively low cost of palm sugar, when purchased through large Asian markets, and the presence of natural potassium, magnesium, zinc, and iron, make it a cost-feasible natural sweetener, with a more pleasing flavor than white sugar.