Sugar is a high-caloric non-food with enormous liabilities. First, from the viewpoint of the universal formula for health, no form of non-artificial sweetener carries enough nutrients with it to justify the number of calories it contains, not even malt extract. White refined sugar contains absolutely no nutrients at all; the "good" or "natural" sweets also carry so little nutrition as to be next to useless. Sweets are so far over on the bad end of the Health = Nutrition / Calories scale that for this reason alone they should be avoided. However, healthy people can usually afford a small amount of sin; why not make it sweets? In small quantity, sugars are probably the easiest indiscretion to digest and the least damaging to the organ systems. Although, speaking of sin, as Edgar Guest, the peoples' poet, once so wisely quipped, (and my husband agrees) "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker." Sugar is a powerful drug! People who abuse sweets set up a cycle of addiction that can be very hard to break. It starts when the body tries to regulate blood sugar. Kicked up to high levels by eating sugar, the pancreas releases insulin. But that is not the end of the chain reaction. Insulin regulates blood sugar levels but also raises brain levels of an amino acid called tryptophan. Tryptophan is the raw material the brain uses to manufacture a neurotransmitter called serotonin. And serotonin plays a huge role in regulating mood. Higher brain levels of serotonin create a feeling of well-being. Eating sugar gives a person a chemical jolt of happiness. Heavy hits of high-glycemic index starch foods are also rapidly converted to sugar. So don't give your kids sweets! Or huge servings of starch to mellow them out. It is wise not to start out life a happiness addict with a severe weight problem. Now that the chemistry of sugar addiction is understood, there currently is a movement afoot to cast the obese as helpless victims of serotonin imbalances and to "treat" them with the same kinds of serotonin-increasing happy drugs (like Prozac) that are becoming so popular with the psychiatric set. This promises to be a multiple billion dollar business that will capture all the money currently flowing into other dieting systems and bring it right back to the AMA/drug company/FDA nexus. The pitch is that when serotonin levels are upped, the desire to eat drops and so is weight. This approach is popular with the obese because it requires no personal responsibility other than taking a pill that really does make them feel happy. However, the same benefit can be had by strict adherence to a low-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Eventually, the brain chemistry rebalances itself and serotonin levels stabilize. Glycemic Index (compared to glucose, which is 100)