Rebuttal to my warning to avoid agave syrup

Hey Kendra,
I hope you are well. I was surprised to see your beef against agave. I don't think all the properties of agave have been discovered. I have noticed that cactus fruits and agave (from cactus) seem to have a more gentle effect on blood sugar then most other sweeteners. I would not claim that agave didn't contain sugar, or that diabetic patients did not need to be careful with it.

But agave and cactus species in general do seem to have some kind of herbal balancing effect on blood sugar in general. I am concerned that misunderstanding regarding agave might prompt the FDA to ban or otherwise control it. Do you remember, the native American Reservation near the school?

The "Pima-Maricopa Indians" have the highest incidence of diabetes in the world. 80% of their population has diabetes. Remember the young girls, 22 years old and 200 + lbs? By all accounts they had no diabetes before the white people put them on a reservation and gave them white bread and lard to make their supposably "traditional native American fry bread".

Before they were put on the reservations their native diets included an enormous amount of cactus; many different kinds, including agave. I remember Peter Big foot saying that the fruits from many cactus species were real sweet, but that it was deceptive. They didn't contain a whole lot of carbohydrates.

I don't know how much actual carbohydrate is in prickly pear cactus apples, but I do know they are a great food for my patients with blood sugar imbalance. They get better on them. One of the reasons I am so sure about this, if you will recall, I am hypoglycemic. I really notice which sweeteners throw off my blood sugar and which don't.

I keep my hypoglycemia under good control with diet, etc. Agave, is far less of a problem for me than other sweeteners. I have noticed I can handle pies made with agave far more easily than any other sweetener. I also noticed you recommended raw honey. While that has some valuable nutritional content, I do find that honey (even raw) is very damaging to hypoglycemic or diabetic patient's blood sugar.

I noticed you liked dehydrated cane syrup. It does seem to be far more gentle to the blood sugar, I would assume because of the mineral content- but perhaps also because of some herbal effect from the cane plant it's self. Brown sugar however, is nothing more than white sugar with molasses. Now molasses is a more gentle sweetener, but white sugar is one of the worst in my opinion, and that is what I have noticed in my practice.

I think one of the main points is that simply making decisions based on reductionist thinking and chemical content is not realistic. It doesn't reflect actual clinical experience as I mentioned above. Regardless of the fructose content, agave is far more gentler on blood sugar in my clinical experience.

There was a study that might shed light (or more questions) on the subject. I heard about this study while I was in medical school. It was about orange juice. Two group of athletes were equally divided into groups based on their ability to run the 50 or 100 yard dash. One group was given frozen concentrate orange juice and the other group was given fresh squeezed.

Both groups had an equal amount of calories. When they had the two groups run again the athletes that had the fresh squeezed orange juice did much better, even though the calories were the same. I think this just goes to show that there is more to the picture than simple reductionist thinking would allow for.
Hope you have a great Thanksgiving! We're going to this giant pot luck full of 100s of vegan health nuts like myself.

Take care, Johnny Lynch, ND California