Plant-Based Sweeteners May Help Manage Diabetes

When Gretchen Becker poster her blog - Idiotic Headline – on June 11, I was happy and deleted my partially completed blog. Now circumstances are pushing me back to rewriting a blog.

I admit I never expected to have a Certified Diabetes Educator use the term “plant-based sweeteners” in a CDE class. Yes, this was in a diabetes education class and not a nutrition class that my doctor suggested I take, after learning Medicare had authorized this. Just goes to show how gullible CDEs can be. She thought she had something new to impress the two patients in her class.

She referred to the two sweeteners, stevianna and inulin and expected us to swallow it up. I stopped her and asked why she would use the term “plant-based sweeteners when almost every other sweetener was also plant based. She asked what I was talking about. I told her she had her facts mixed up and I would not consider any plant-based sweeteners because this included table sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

She asked which plants these came from as if she thought they only came from the table. Even this brought a snicker from my classmate. I said table sugar comes from sugarcane or sugar beets and unless I didn't know something, they are plants. I continued that HFCS is produced from corn and farmers grow many of these plants.

My classmate had a big grin on her face and she said, “He is correct and you have blown it.” She even added, “How gullible do you think we are?” I added that if she had used stevianna and inulin and not plant-based sweeteners, we would not have had this discussion, but you had to use the term plant-based sweeteners, which we cannot accept.

She referred us to the Medical News Today article and my classmate pulled up Gretchen's blog and linked to the EurekAlert site and asked if this was where she had been suckered in to the plant-based term.

The class went from bad to worse when she talked about the goals we needed to set for ourselves as she was talking about the ADA guidelines and we asked her why we would want to promote the diabetes complications when even the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists used more reasonable goals and even those were somewhat high when compared to what Dr. Bernstein recommends. When she put Dr. Bernstein down, both of us decided it was time to leave and did so without hesitation.

Once we were outside, she showed me what she had in her folder - “Diabetes Solutions” by Dr. Bernstein. I said you came prepared and she commented we both did ourselves good. I added that she apparently has not been out of school that long and may have just passed the CDE test.

At that point, we were at our cars, said goodbye, and left.