Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's Ask a Nutritionist podcast, brought to you by Nutritional

Weight and Wellness.

We're thrilled to be celebrating 20 years on air, discussing the connection between what you eat and how you feel while sharing practical, real-life solutions for healthier living through balanced nutrition.

Thank you for your support and listenership over the years.

Now let's get started.

On today's show, we will be answering the question from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

The question from our Facebook group today is, are Monkfruit and Stevia okay?

Now, this is a question I get asked about a lot. So I was happy to get to dive into the details of these two sweeteners and do more research to share with you all.

The short answer is yes. For most people, stevia and monkfruit can be added to a balanced

meal plan safely. We'll dig into all of the details about monk fruit and stevia so you can make

the decision for yourself if their products you want to consume.

Our community knows that reducing sugar intake and added sugar products is an important lifestyle

habit. It can be important to help you lose weight and sugar cravings, have balanced

blood sugar levels, along with that may come the occasional need for a little something sweet.

And a sugar substitute makes it a little easier to eat less sugar.

At nutritional weight and wellness, we recommend avoiding artificial sweeteners like

aspartame, which is the blue packet at restaurants through grulose, the yellow packet, or saccharine,

the pink packet.

These artificial sweeteners can interfere with metabolism and may cause weight gain and affect brain health. If you see a sugar substitute that ends in an OL, that is a sugar alcohol.

Examples are manitol and sorbitol and arithyrtol.

They're often found in things like protein bars, sugar-free candies, and chewing them.

Generally, these are okay in small quantities, as long as you tolerate them.

...