Allulose

What is the deal with this new miracle sugar – Allulose? We have been hearing forever that sugar is evil and the worst thing for our health, so why is this sugar so different? There is a lot of information here. I like to start with the basics, so I go to the PubMed database in the National Library of Medicine where all the basic research articles on medical stuff hide. At first glance, I find 937 research papers on allulose. So even though it is being touted as new by all the YouTube personalities, it has actually been around for quite a while. I first started using it about three years ago. It was costly back then, but a way to make it from the fructose portion of regular sugar has brought the cost down to doable levels.

After reading a couple dozen articles, I began to see just how amazing this stuff really is. Allulose is a natural sugar, but rare. It is found in such things as wheat and figs in tiny amounts. The chemical structure is the same as the evil sugar fructose, but one carbon atom is bent a different direction. This tiny change makes a world of difference. The granulated sugar we are all familiar with is half fructose and half glucose. The glucose portion is what becomes blood sugar while the fructose half goes to the liver to form fats in the liver and uric acid, the stuff that causes gout. Allulose goes down completely different pathways.

My first attraction to allulose was because it is a low-calorie sweetener found in nature like stevia or monk fruit but with many of the same properties of regular sugar. Allulose has one-tenth the calories of sugar – 0.4 calories per gram. It acts like sugar in cooking, unlike sugar alcohols like erythritol or xylitol. It will caramelize to form candies and give that nice brown color to baked goods. Since most of it is absorbed into the blood, it is less likely to give you bowel distress. Keep the dose per day to below 0.4 gms per pound of body weight split into two doses. Most importantly, it does not raise your blood sugar, so it is a sweetener that you can use on a keto diet. Although it is classed as a carb, it does not trigger the release of insulin. 

Starting at the mouth, allulose tastes about 70% as sweet as table sugar. I mix monk fruit and stevia in my allulose to bring up the sweetness. In the GI tract, about 70% of the allulose is absorbed by the gut into the bloodstream. As it travels down the gut, it stimulates the release of the hormone GLP-1, which helps turn off our hunger. In fact it stimulates about 10X more GLP-1 release than any other food. This is probably the biggest role for allulose that everyone is looking at right now. This is the same hormone that the popular and expensive weight loss drug ,Ozempic, mimics. Allulose does the same job for much less money and without all the nasty side effects Ozemipc has. The hunger-relieving effect of allulose lasts about 2 hours. I have been making iced tea sweetened with allulose for the last couple of weeks to keep my hunger turned down.

While the allulose is traveling through the gut, it actually reduces the amount and rate of the absorption of other sugars in the diet. This means that consuming allulose with a sugar-containing meal will cause the meal to have a lower impact on your blood sugar. This is great news if you are sugar-sensitive (pre-diabetic) or overtly diabetic as 80% of the American population already is. Studies have shown that adding allulose to a diabetic diet improves their blood sugar levels after they eat, and improves their pancreatic function. In fact several studies have shown that allulose actually protects the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas.

Part of how allulose protects cells is because it has anti-inflammatory properties. It calms down two of the key inflammation pathways in the body: the NF Kappa Beta pathways and the NERF2 pathways. These pathways were studied inside fat cells and it was shown that the allulose protected the fat cells from forming more fat when exposed to palmitic acid; the most common saturated fat in the diet. Although we don’t like to think about it, our fat cells become little inflammation factories when they get too large. Allulose appears to help.

This is where I get to write about fat loss. This is one of the big hopes of allulose. Huge weight loss results were achieved with mice on super high doses of allulose, but we humans can not tolerate those dose levels. Only a couple of studies have been done on humans and significant weight loss was achieved over 12 weeks, but these were small studies of a few dozen people. No long-term studies have been done yet, but I am sure they are in the making. Obesity is such a big problem (pun intended) in the US. The only issue is allulose is a food and there are no big drug profits to be made with a food that helps you lose weight. Ozempic list price is $935 per week – some nice profits there. Taking a couple tablespoons of allulose a day is only going to cost you $15 a week – not a lot of profit. Without potential profit, there is no motivation to spend money to run big trials and studies on the effectiveness of allulose. There might even be motivation to invent studies saying it does not work at all. Sadly invented studies are becoming all too common these days.

Studies in mice found that allulose seems to reduce fatty liver. This is one of the key drivers in metabolic syndrome, the underlying cause of most chronic diseases. A small study with 90 human subjects showed similar decreased fat stores in the liver results. Other interesting findings with allulose in animals involve muscle metabolism. The allulose appears to increase the endurance capacity of muscles by upregulating the muscle’s ability to burn fats. Along those same lines, allulose relieved muscle insulin resistance in rats fed a high-fat diet. This is something that may be of importance to folks on a keto diet and going to the gym to build muscle mass and burn calories. Plus anything that reduces insulin resistance is a very good thing.

Other interesting studies are showing allulose fights atherosclerosis, and plaque formation in the arteries that leads to heart attacks and stroke. One source I found said that allulose reduces uric acid in the body. It also shows some cancer-fighting abilities and functioning as an anti-oxidant. This stuff is showing all sorts of benefits for the body. The big question now is how well do all these interesting studies play out in the real world with real people. Lab studies and controlled eating trials are all well and good, but things just don’t work the same way out in the day-to-day life of Jane and Joe average. Only time will tell. As I say, I started playing with allulose 3 years ago, but only dabbling with it as simply an alternative sweetener. All the health benefits are only now coming to light. I have only begun using allulose on a regular basis for the last couple of weeks. I tend to be an early adopter when it comes to biohacking my own body. The science still has to catch up.

The upside to all the research for us early adopters is that there has been a lot of research on the safety of allulose. All the studies I have read say that it is very safe when used in the suggested doses. I did accidentally overdose one day and can report that you probably don’t want to do that. I can’t recall ever having gone to the bathroom so many times in one day. I am just glad it was on a day off. At work that would not have been pretty. Nothing I had read actually told me exactly what a proper dose of allulose would be at that time. After that experience, I did the research to find the actual specific data on bowel tolerance for allulose, which I have passed on to you in this article.

So everything considered, I am excited to see what results come from my playing around with allulose. I can report that it really does reduce my appetite. I am putting that to the test this week as I do a fast mimicking protocol for five days. I am planning to have allulose in a double sugar form in the office for my patients starting this week hopefully. By adding stevia and monk fruit to the allulose, you can get twice the sweetness per serving and save yourself a bit of money over what is available online. However you want to use it, just remember to limit your use to about two tablespoons in the morning and another two tablespoons in the afternoon for a happy gut. I plan to sip it all day in a beverage like green tea.

Take care,

David

Ellen

Last week we had the excitement of getting an ice cream maker in order to make ice cream with the new rare sugar allulose. Well all of last week Ellen and I were fast mimicking to stimulate our bodies to recycle old cell and build new ones. Well we finally get to try out the ice cream maker and see how the allulose works out in ice cream!

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