Welcome to Episode #36 of The Raw Food Podcast!  I am your host, Laura-Jane The Rawtarian, and today it is a massive face-off: Juicing vs. Smoothie-ing.  We’re going to duke it out here on the Raw Food Podcast, so stay tuned and I will be back with you shortly.

Thank you so much for joining me!  Now, is it possible to have a face-off and duke it out between smoothies and juices when it’s only Laura-Jane on the podcast?  Yes, of course it is possible!  I can wear two hats; I can talk and argue for (or perhaps against) one or more of these subjects.  I know you’re probably thinking in your head that you prefer juicing vs. smoothie-ing, or vice-versa – you may have a preference – but of course I’m not afraid to take a stand when it comes to healthy eating or any subject.  I think it’s sometimes actually easier (and more important) to just pick a side rather than just being too inclusive and say everything is fine.  But in this case, and on this episode, I am going to have sort of a disappointing answer and, of course, I’m going to say: I love smoothies AND I love juices.  They’re both beautiful; they both have their place.  You can’t really have a face-off or a duke-out between two things that are both amazing.  It would be similar to saying, “What’s better: Fruit or Vegetables?”  You can’t really just choose one or the other; they both have their place.

So how I thought I would talk about this subject today on The Raw Food Podcast was just go over the basics to make sure everyone was on the same page about what the differences are between juicing and smoothie-ing (I don’t know if that’s a verb, but if not… It is now!).  So that is essentially what we’re going to do.

Of course, let me just break it down for you very briefly here: so when you’re making a smoothie, that’s where you’re going to be cutting up some fruit and vegetables, putting it in a blender, and blending it all up.  That’s going to be quite thick and it’s going to be in a most simplistic format.  Let’s say you’re making a banana smoothie: it’s bananas, just sort of liquefied and all smooshed together, and usually you might – if it’s just bananas, for example – add a little bit of water.  Then you’ve got basically pulverized bananas and you’re drinking it. Usually the texture, I’ve heard (and I believe), the best texture for a smoothie is, of course, something that you could eat with a spoon – thick enough to eat with a spoon – or suck through a straw.  So it has that nice smoothie consistency.  I’m sure most of the people listening to this podcast are familiar with a smoothie!  So, of course, that is done with a blender.

Now if we contrast that with juicing: normally I would use the same fruit in this example, but bananas have so little juice in them (I’ve never actually juiced a banana before, but I don’t recommend it).  What happens in a juicer is that instead of just squishing everything up, the juicer is separating the pulp and the fiber from the juice.  So if you put, say, an apple in your juicer to make apple juice, of course it’s not going to be a thick, chunky, smoothie-kinda thing.  It’s just going to give you only the juice; it’s going to remove all of the pulp and all of the fiber and, hopefully, the skin and that stuff out.  So there is actually a huge difference between juices and smoothies.

So, of course, one of the basic differences at the beginning there is to make a smoothie, you’re doing that in a blender.  You’re not actually getting rid of any of the fruit or vegetable, you’re just squishing it all up, pulverizing it, and blending it.  But in the juicer, you’re just only extracting a small amount of the fruit or vegetable; you’re just extracting the juice, and then you’re just going to drink that.  And really you do need an electric juicer to do that, because it’s going to be a lot of work to make juice with just a hand-juicer.  So, one of those basic differences is the equipment that you need.

Of course, there are some people that we know of like Joe Cross, from the amazing movie Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead.  He really advocates juicing as a way to reset your body and do all kinds of great things for yourself.  Then there’s other people like Victoria Boutenko, who’s like the Smoothie Lady, and she’s like “Smoothies all the way!”  I used to kind of be more in the smoothie camp myself, but mostly that was just because when I started out, I did not have all of the healthy equipment.  I did have a blender, but I didn’t have a juicer.  So of course I started out mostly with smoothies.  And I love smoothies (I love green smoothies, particularly in the morning, etc.), but recently I’ve gotten a little more into juicing.  Again, I’m not really affiliating myself more with one or the other; I think they both really have their place.

So I think maybe I’ll start with talking with you about smoothies in particular, and some of the benefits that smoothies embody.  What the benefits are of choosing smoothies, especially if you’re just new into healthy eating and haven’t really done either of those things.

I would probably suggest: first, let’s think about what equipment you have.  In my case, I already had a blender, so that was the easiest thing to start with was making smoothies.  And there’s a couple of things that I really like about smoothies when we’re comparing it to juicing.  With smoothies, Number 1, you use way more of the fruits and vegetables, which means – drum roll, please – smoothies go farther; they’re less expensive to make.  Think about it: if you’re making a smoothie, you’re just going to peel your bananas and throw away the peel.  You’re chopping your apples, removing the core, and blending the whole apple.  You’re getting to use most, if not all, of the fruit and vegetables that you’re putting in your blender.  So in order to have breakfast, for example, I might wanna have a couple of bananas, an apple, an orange, and some water and pineapple.  So even that is going to be quite expensive, especially if we’re using all organic products.  But, in order to make a full breakfast of juice, it’s actually going to take even more, because, remember, when you’re juicing, you’re only drinking a small amount of the actual volume of what you’re juicing.  Because the juicer is going to separate out the pulp and remove all the fiber, it’s going to take a lot more input to get the same amount of output.  So, I do definitely choose smoothies more often because I find it – especially if you’re using organic produce – it’s more cost-effective to do smoothies than it is to do juicing.

I do find, as well, that smoothies tend to be easier to clean up after, but only marginally.  Before I got into juicing, I used to have this idea that I was really scared of juicing, because I thought, “This contraption, this juicer, is going to have all these compartments, it’s going to be SO hard to clean, and it’s going to take a lot of elbow grease to clean this thing.”  And, you know me; I don’t like to clean and I don’t like a lot of effort.  So I think I had this idea that juicing was this huge crazy ordeal… and I have to eat my words a little bit on that, because cleaning a juicer is not that much harder than cleaning a blender.  It is a little bit more work, but if you have a good juicer that has reasonable parts that can just be taken out, it doesn’t take that much longer.  Let’s say: if cleaning your blender is going to take a minute, maybe cleaning your juicer is maybe going to take 2 or 3 minutes or something like that.  So it’s a little longer but it’s not a huge difference.  But even in that example, cleaning a smoothie-maker (AKA a blender) is easier, because all you have to clean is your actual carafe (or big jug) and lid.  So I do love that.

I also have to say from a nutritional standpoint: fiber is something that we all need.  It helps all the food move down our digestive tract and go out where it needs to go out.  Fiber is something that’s very important, so it’s nice – when you’re drinking a smoothie – you’re getting all of the fiber from the fruit and vegetables.  So those are some of the basic benefits of making a smoothie in a blender.

Now, why do some people love juicing so much?  Well, there are definitely good sides to juicing.  First of all: because when you’re juicing, the juice actually retains like 95% of the vitamins and minerals and plant chemicals that are coming out into the juice.  Yes, juicers will remove the fiber, the pulp, and things like that, but the juice that comes out is like really dense and really nutritionally abundant; it does retain pretty much like 95% of the vitamins and minerals that are in the fruits and vegetables that you juice.  Basically, juicing is like a major shot in the arm – so to speak – of amazing nutrition.  So that, of course, is awesome.  And I do sometimes feel like such a huge infusion (when I have a good juice), feeling like it’s going right into me and just being assimilated right into my body immediately, and I love that.  People do say as well – and I don’t know about the scientific side of this – that normally when you eat, say, an apple, and you’re just eating it on its own, your body needs to actually separate out the fiber and process all of that stuff to get the nutrients out of it, but some people will say (especially if you’re ill or something like that), that maybe if you’re juicing and removing some of the fiber, you’re giving your body a little bit of a break so that it doesn’t have to do all that processing to get everything into your body in that juice form.  So that’s one argument people will say about juicing being good is that the juicer is doing all of the work that your body would have to do.  But, of course, we do all need fiber to some degree, so I think we wouldn’t want to just be juicing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over a really long term, because we do need that fiber as well.

What else is great about juicing?  Well, for me personally, when it comes to smoothies, I don’t like a cold smoothie that has been in the fridge for a couple of hours.  So I don’t like to make a smoothie in advance at all, because I find it gets kind of unappealing and gross.  But with juice, if I make a really nice one (like my favourite carrot apple ginger juice) in the morning, I could make a big batch of that and just drink it throughout the day – or turn it into a green juice and drink that throughout the day.  You don’t wanna keep it for much longer than a day; once it hits the air, the juice starts to oxidize and lose a little bit of nutritional value – and it can get funky.  It’s not the same as the juice that sits on the shelf of the grocery store for 2 years, so you don’t want to leave it for too long.  For me, I find that if you’re going to make something and then kind of enjoy it throughout the day, juices are better for that.  I personally don’t care for a smoothie once it’s been sitting for like 20 minutes; I’m just not into it anymore.  So that is one nice thing about juicing as well.

So, as you can see, I’m kind of outlining some of the benefits of both.  I can share my personal experience that, predominantly (because of money reasons), I definitely juice less than I would like to.  I would love to get up in the morning and have fresh blueberry juice that’s organic and costs $20 a glass.  I would love to do that, but that’s just not realistic or practical.  That being said, I do like to juice on occasion; it’s probably more of a special occasion kind of experience for me.  Maybe on a Saturday morning, if I’m having a really nice leisurely morning and I wanna do something special, I might make some juice.  Also, maybe if I’m feeling a little run-down or like I need to give myself a little bit of self-love, I might make myself a juice.

Sometimes I might have a juice as a substitute for a meal later on in the day, like not for breakfast. Occasionally, if you really listen to your body, sometimes you’re thinking “I just really feel like I would love to have a juice for lunch” or something like that.  Other times I think I would like to have a really huge raw vegan burger for lunch, so I don’t always have the juice cravings.  But sometimes when you’re really listening to your body, you can get in tune with what you need.  Particularly, I find if I’ve been having a few really heavy meals in a row, my body just tells me (in no uncertain terms), “I think it feels like a juice would be good for lunch,” and I try to go with that.  For me, if I have a craving for a juice, I will make it.

I did mention one of my favorite juices there, which is the carrot-apple-ginger (sometimes I will love to add a lemon in there as well), and that is a very great juice, because – at least where I live – it’s a very inexpensive juice.  Whereas, if you’re going to be making watermelon juice or cherry juice or grape juice, the cost of that can add up very quickly; to make a nice big glass of juice out of grapes is going to take a lot of grapes!  So [carrot-apple-ginger] is a great option ,and it’s one of my favorite juices.

I would say, again, that if you’re trying to create a healthy habit for yourself – I’ve talked a lot about forming healthy habits: episode 23 of the Raw Food Podcast was “How to Eat Healthy Every Day”, episode 24 talked about how raw food changed my life, and you know I love talking about behavior change and all of those kinds of things; I’m really passionate about that.  I think what you wanna do is think about which one appeals to you more, which one is more practical for you.  Certainly if you can do both, I think that’s ideal, but (particularly when we’re getting started) it’s easier to just pick one little corner of raw food – for example:  “OK.  I’m going to do green smoothies every morning” or “I’m going to do green juices every morning.”  Pick one thing, really get good at that, and get in a groove rather than try to do too many new things at once, because that can be overwhelming (because you’re just sort of sucking at everything!).  Whereas, if you can get something, really get it going, get used to it, and get comfortable with it, THEN you can really start branching out.  I would say if you’re just getting started, go with whichever one is more appealing to you.  If you’re really on a budget, I would say go more towards the smoothies, but if you don’t have a blender and you own a juicer (or someone regifts you a juicer), then I’d say just go with whichever one is going to work for you.

So that is a little bit about the duel between the juicing and the smoothie-ing. 

What else can I tell you?  Well, maybe I should just touch a little bit in more detail on GREEN juices and GREEN smoothies.  Of course, we love to have our fruits, because they’re so sweet and wonderful and delicious; and we love to have our greens, because they bring those other nutrients and they also will sort of dampen the sweetness a little bit, like counterbalance it.  When I’m at home, just drinking a pure fruit smoothie feels really sweet to me, almost sometimes too sweet – I know that’s hard to believe; the Rawtarian is saying something is too sweet!  So if we’re adding a little bit of greens to our juices or smoothies to create a green juice or a green smoothie, that can be a really easy way to get people who don’t particularly like greens to get a little bit of greens in their diet. 

We hear a lot about kale being a really trendy green right now, but I’m not a big fan of adding kale, particularly to a smoothie, because it has such a strong kale-y taste.  I definitely recommend using spinach as the green to use in your green smoothie, because it has the most mild flavor.  You can actually add quite a lot of spinach before you really even taste it – as long as your blender is a good blender and can really blend it up.  So that’s a little bit about the green smoothie, and of course you may have heard me talk in other episodes about that:  Episode 3 would green smoothies, but perhaps I talked about it again.  You can look that up at therawtarian.com/podcasts, but what I was going to refer to was that you’ve normally heard me talk about green smoothies and how the best ratio is usually about 2/3 fruit and 1/3 greens.  If you keep it generally in that ratio, it’s going to still taste really fruity, but you’re going to get a lot of your daily intake of greens that way, and also (if you find it too sweet) it can dull down the sweetness and bring up that less sweet taste.

Now, when we’re talking about green juices: when I first got into juicing, I thought: “I’ll just put a little handful of spinach in my carrot juice and I’ll make a green juice.”  So I’m juicing and I’ve juiced all my carrots; it’s this beautiful glass of carrot juice and I think: “OK I’m going to add a little bit of spinach.”  So I put a little handful of spinach in the juicer and I juice it and you know what comes out the juice end?  It’s like the tiniest eyedropper of green – one drop of spinach juice!  My point that I’m trying to get at – and I hope you’re getting it – is that it takes SO much spinach to get a tiny bit of green juice out of it.  So what you need to do, when you’re trying to make green juice, is pick a green that is already really watery, because otherwise you’re going to spend about $99 on spinach and get about a teaspoon of spinach juice.  Of course, a really obvious nice green to do in this case would be cucumber; that would be an example of a very wet green that would work really well.

So, that’s a little bit about juicing and smoothie-ing.  Again, I think they’re both amazing; I want you to be doing both, no matter who you are.  I really can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t like fresh juices or smoothies.  I don’t know why you wouldn’t be doing smoothies or juices.  I know a lot of people who are not raw or vegan (just average people) who love to do smoothies for breakfast.  I’ve also heard, actually, that smoothies and other alternatives for breakfast are becoming so popular that the breakfast cereal industry has actually had to close some manufacturing plants, because cereal is becoming a little bit less popular.  So smoothies and juices are awesome; they’re not a new idea, but there seems to be quite the resurgence happening – even with regular people, not people like you or I probably, but in the average North American culture – and that’s amazing to see.

One other thing I might just say while we’re closing up here about the smoothie aspect is: I know some of you have a problem with bananas – perhaps you don’t like bananas.  One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of smoothie recipes have bananas in them for a couple of reasons, but predominantly because bananas add such a wonderful creaminess to a smoothie.  That’s one of the main reasons that they’re included is that they have such a wonderful creaminess, and quite a bit of sweetness as well.  So if you are banana-sensitive, have kids that hate bananas, or whatever the banana issue might be (‘cause I hear that from a lot of you), I would just remind you that bananas are used for creaminess predominantly.  Sometimes another thing you can do is look for smoothies that have avocado instead, because avocado has lots of good fats and really brings a lot of creaminess to the smoothie as well.  And even if you don’t think you would like avocado in a smoothie: if it’s in with a lot of fruit, it’s not going to taste weird at all; it’s going to add a really nice creaminess.

Lastly, what I’ll say to cap that off as well is that when you’re trying to make a recipe (no matter what it is, whether it’s juicing, smoothies, a dessert, an entrée, whatever), when you’re starting to get into substituting things – like “I don’ t have almonds; I’ll use walnuts.”  “I hate bananas, but I’ll use an avocado.”  Unless you’re really experienced, I suggest not making substitutions.  Instead, just look for a different recipe that has all the ingredients that you like.  We’re in such an amazing time where now you can look at so many different websites online for different recipes.  So if you’re just getting starting out, I definitely recommend trying to avoid substituting too many things in your recipes and instead just look for other recipes that have everything that you need.  You’re going to be assured more success if you do it that way.  But it is helpful to know, for example: if you hate bananas and all of these smoothie recipes have bananas in them, the bananas are for creaminess.  So what else might be creamy?  Oh, ok, avocados are creamy, so let’s look for a smoothie recipe that has avocado in it.  So it’s helpful to know what you’re looking for, and of course that comes with time and experience.

So that is my not-quite-a-duel between smoothies vs. juicing.  I think you can hear my somewhat bias that I am a smoothie person; I do love them, particularly if you have an amazing blender like I do.  I have the Vitamix blender; it’s super expensive, but it’s awesome.  It makes everything so smooth!  You could put anything in there and it comes out beautifully, so smooth.  You don’t see any chunks.  You don’t taste anything weird.  You just have beautiful, creamy smoothie-ness.  So if I had to choose (if you held me down and gave me a noogie on my scalp and said “You have to choose! Which is your preference?”), I would say smoothies.  That’s probably just because they’re cheaper to make, so that’s more realistic for me and more practical for a lot of you over the long-term.

I am Laura-Jane The Rawtarian from therawtarian.com.  Enjoy your raw adventure!

You have been listening to the Raw Food Podcast with your host, The Rawtarian.  Be sure to visit me at therawtarian.com, where you can browse over 100 of my absolute favorite simple, satisfying, raw vegan recipes that are quick to make from simple ingredients and taste amazing. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for my newsletter and you’ll get a PDF of 11 of my most favorite, most satisfying, most delicious recipes: including Raw Vegan Alfredo Sauce, Raw Brownies, and a whole host of other delicious recipes that you can make at home that are raw and taste amazing.  Thank you so much for joining me and I hope to hear from you very soon.  Until next time, enjoy your raw adventure!

Welcome to episode number 34 of The Raw Food Podcast. I am your host Laura-Jane the Rawtarian and today we are going to be talking all about sweeteners. We have fruits, we have liquid sweeteners and in the end we’ll talk a little bit about the glycemic index and I'll break that down in a very manageable way for you. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today and I’ll be back with you shortly.

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Raw Food Podcast. As you know I am well known for my raw food and raw vegan deserts because I have a major sweet tooth and I love sugary delicious delights. What I want to do today is give you two main tangents to talk about. One, I'm going to talk at a very basic level about the different types of sweeteners used in raw desert recipes. We’re going to talk about fruit and liquid sweeteners and how to use them in our recipes. Near the end of the podcast I'm going to talk a little bit more about the health benefits of some of the different sweeteners.

As you know, I love my desserts. My chocolate brownies are one of my most popular recipes, which are sweetened with dates and a little bit of honey. In a lot of my recipes you’ll know that I give a few different options for sweeteners. I thought I would basically break it down by first talking about fruit as a sweetener, and then the different liquid sweeteners available to you when you’re eating a raw food lifestyle.

So number one: when given the choice you definitely want to be sweetening with fruit. When I have a fruit smoothie or a green smoothie I don’t need to sweeten it or anything because it’s already naturally sweet with the fruit. It’s great because you not only get the sweetness, from bananas or dates for example, but you get a lot of other nutritional value like fiber.

Now I get a ton of questions and emails about substituting in recipes. I’m not going to tell you at all "fruit is the best, so even though this recipes calls for maple syrup, I’m going to use bananas instead!" Sometimes that could work, but when you're just starting out you want to probably follow recipes a little more than randomly substituting anything sweet for each other.

That said, fruit is the number one sweetener so a lot my recipes will include a lot of fruit. Let’s take my chocolate brownies, which as you probably know is a raw food recipe predominantly based out of walnuts and a lot of dates; some cocoa powder to get the chocolate flavor.

In that recipe I think I call for a cup of dates, which gives both sweetness and stickiness. The dates are doing double duty – they’re making it a sweet brownie and also helping to make the recipe stick together. In that recipe as well I also suggest adding one or two tablespoons of honey to bump up the sweetness a little bit extra.

Some recipes use both fruit and the sweetener as well. As you get more familiar, you'll know you sometimes don’t want things as sweet, or for a medical reason you need to cut down on your sweetness. If you see that a recipe requires a little bit of extra honey or extra maple syrup, then you can cut down on those. Generally, in the raw food lifestyle, dates and bananas both tend to be used probably because they're couple of the sweetest fruit. They’re used a lot in raw food recipes, generally just to add sweetness. The dates, as I mentioned, add a nice stickiness that can be useful. In terms of the bananas, they’re used for sweetness but also for creaminess.

Sometimes people may ask “Well I hate bananas, can I use dates instead?” I would say depending on the recipe. If it’s a sweet chocolate-y pudding that has banana in it, I would say “Well that recipe the bananas are used for sweetness, but in this case you’re also going to need something creamy too because the bananas are doing double duty.”

If you want something other than dates, I sometimes suggest you can used dried apricots instead but they’re not as sweet. So if you’re going to use them instead, you need to bump up the sweetness – like maybe with a liquid sweetener.

When you're looking at my recipes you can get a sense of why so many include dates. It's because they're one of the best sweeteners that is also a fruit. If I wanted it to be a sweet desert recipe I will try to use dates first, but sometimes it’s not always possible. For one thing the dates are very, very dark brown. So if I want to make a sweet recipe, like a basic vanilla cheesecake recipe – I want that to be light-colored and creamy, almost white. If I sweeten it with dates it’s going to change the color. In that case I may want to use a liquid sweetener instead.

When you’re looking at my raw food, raw vegan recipes at the rawtarian.com, I frequently would use these three liquid sweeteners and I will usually day they can all be switched out for each other. Maple Syrup is one I use, Agave Nectar is another, or Honey. They all vary a little, but they’re all generally similar in terms of sweetness. Out of those three I would say honey is the sweetest, followed by agave nectar, and then maple syrup is the least potent. But let’s talk about each of those liquid sweeteners.

Maple syrup is used in a lot of raw food recipes but it's a little bit controversial – they’re all a little bit controversial for one reason or another. Although it’s a really pure sweetener, it usually has been boiled or heated at some point to get to the format you’re used to seeing. It may have been heated about 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Maple syrup I love and of course you're always using pure maple syrup.

Now I’ve been raw since 2009 and right when I started, Agave nectar seemed to be all the rage as the most popular. It’s made from the nectar of this South American (or Central American) plant, it’s almost like a big huge cactus-y thing. It has definitely become less and less popular. Number one I think it's very refined and it does spike your blood sugar quite a bit – it’s a bit high on the glycemic index. So some people don't like it for that reason as well. They say it’s almost similar to using corn syrup. I don't know if it's that bad for you, but while it is falling out of favor, it still seems to be used quite a bit.

Thirdly, honey. Now I do generally call myself a vegan and honey does comes from bees, so it might be a little controversial. In my opinion, unpasteurized honey is probably the most quote-on-quote “raw” of the three that I’ve mentioned. It’s the least processed and depending on where you live it may, from a local perspective, actually have not traveled many miles to get to your plate. Where I live, in rural Canada, I actually know where my honey comes from. I get my unpasteurized honey locally from a guy named David and his bees.

So it does come from animals, so it may not be okay for you from a vegan perspective. For me I probably use honey the most of the liquid sweeteners because it's not very refined or processed and I like buying from a local producer, I feel good about that.

You need to choose your liquid sweetener that works for you, but generally in terms of my raw food recipes – you can use any of those three liquid sweeteners interchangeably. So even if my brownie recipe calls for two teaspoons of honey, if you prefer maple syrup or agave nectar just use two tablespoons of those. This is only talking about three sweeteners; we know coconut sugar is becoming very popular, but those are the three I’ve been using since 2009. I still use all three, but honey I use more than anything else.

Now I want to talk about a different sweetener – Stevia. I don't remember when I've heard of it, maybe a couple years ago, but it’s definitely a sweetener getting more popular. In short it's becoming more popular because it doesn't spike your blood sugar while still being sweet, unlike Agave nectar which I talked about the issues with that before.

I don’t use Stevia per say in my recipes, I don’t write it out, but I do use Stevia a little bit and I'm starting to use it more. I’m going to start talking a little science-y when I explain why, so hang on to your hats – I’m going to keep it very basic so anybody, even our twelve year old sons, can know what I’m talking about. I’ll try to keep it easy to understand.

Stevia in its basic form, and probably why I don't use it interchangeably with my recipes in the same amount, because it comes in two different forms that I know of. One is powered Stevia, where it would be either white or green, and a teeny-tiny pinch of it is really sweet because it’s so potent. It’s super condensed, it’s super sweet, so you can only use a teeny tiny bit.

Now let’s pretend we’re making brownies and we wanted to, instead of two tablespoons of honey, use a teeny-tiny pinch of Stevia it's really harder to use in a powder form. That’s because it doesn't distribute much in a solid food. It works well for a pudding, or something liquid-y which can easily distribute it around, but the powder form doesn't work well in a pie crust or something like that.

It also comes in drops and it's easier to use than the powder, but it’s also not as easy to use as honey for example. It's more potent and you can't just use quite exactly the same as honey for instance because of that. Somebody really needs to come up with a liquid Stevia that has some kind of blank tasting filler, that allows you to use it and with the same texture as honey. I'm sure someone is coming up with that right now, but right now that's the state Stevia is in.

Well, you may ask, why would anyone use Stevia when they can use maple syrup instead? This is where the science-y discussion begins. The basic concept I’m going to compare and contrast is that certain types of sweeteners just go right through your blood with no filter. You get like a crazy sugar fit and that's what we call high glycemic sweeteners. Those are the sweeteners that go really fast into your bloodstream and increase the glucose level in your blood. The high glycemic ones go straight into your blood and it's a crazy sugar party, and that can be bad.

Then we contrast that with low glycemic filters, which just trickle out into your blood stream, rise the blood sugar slowly and are digested more slowly with stability. When possible it’s best to choose a lower glycemic sweetener, which just trickles out into your blood and gives you a calmer experience.

Sugars actually are kind of crazy complicated, but that’s the basic gist of it. For me I’m not particularly caring too much for myself one way or the other, but a lot of people who have medical problems, like diabetics, are really conscious of the level of glucose in their blood. That's why Stevia is popular - it's very, very low glycemic compared to other sweeteners.

If we actually look at our sweeteners that we talked about, a lot of fruit is low glycemic because of a lot of what’s in the fruit and so the index and how potent the sweetener is gets affected by what else is in the food. Many fruits are low glycemic, so they’re actually okay for some diabetics to eat, but bananas and dates are considered high on the glycemic index because they are so sweet. The liquid sweeteners are pretty high on the index as well, so if you really are concerned about maintaining blood sugar levels, or have medical issues related to that, I would definitely recommend checking out Stevia. I think that would be very useful for you.

Another thing to mention about this, and I alluded to it a little before, but when we think about making raw vegan sweet recipes or whatever sweet recipes, then it really matters what you're making. It's not like you would say to yourself "I'm always going to use Stevia or honey for everything because I hate fruit!" because a lot of these foods the texture matters. I definitely encourage substitution, but if you can't eat a certain fruit or a certain something, then don't try to modify a recipe – keep looking for a recipe that doesn't include that thing you can't eat.

Generally when you begin substituting a lot of things in a recipe, it may go haywire and it's hard to tell exactly what happened or why. If someone says “I want to make this recipe but I can’t this and I can’t have that” then I would write back saying to try finding a tomato soup recipe that doesn’t have the things you can’t eat.

In a general sense I would say try not to do too much substituting, because the texture of things matter. Within that liquid sweetener group, of maple syrup or agave nectar or honey, you can definitely substitute within that group.

So this was an intense podcast, but I think it's important to know the different sweeteners you can use as a raw food type. I guess I’ll leave it there, but since this was such an intensely crazy podcast I should end with some a light-hearted story.

In Canada, in Prince Edward Island where I live, it’s very hot in my house with really high humidity. One of my favorite things I’ve been eating lately, and having fun making with different raw sweeteners, is different deserts. Like of course banana ice cream, where you freeze a banana and put it in the food processer and enjoy that as a banana ice cream.

I’ve also been making “fudgsicles” that I love to eat in the summer time. Usually what I’ll do is make a nice sweet smoothie, which I wouldn’t sweeten with any liquid sweetener, I’d just use dates or bananas actually. I would also use some leftover Chia pudding and sweeten it with honey, or even Stevia, and then any leftovers I would put in a Popsicle mold and enjoy those. So that’s a little bit about sweeteners in the hot summer in my place, and I guess I will leave it there.

Stay tuned for the next podcast. I’m hoping to talk about sprouting, that’ll be a very useful episode as well because I’m really enjoying making my own alfalfa sprouts and I’m going to talk about sprouting seeds and beans and things like that. That should be interesting for you next time in episode thirty-five. Thank you so much for joining me, I am Laura-Jane The Rawtarian and I hope to hear from you soon.

If you do have any ideas about podcast episodes that you would like to hear about in the future, shoot an email at lj@therawtarian.com. For sure if you want to be kept up to date with everything going on in the Rawtarian world, do subscribe to my e-newsletter. It’s free, you can get that at therawtarian.com/newsletter and when you sign-up to that you will get a free e-book.

Thank you so much for joining me and happy sweetening!