Dates contain huge amounts of sugar and are paleo (yumm!), I believe
something like 5 - 10grams of sugar in a regular sized date. They used
to use date syrup before the days of refined sucrose.

Dates make me temporarily bloated but no ill effects otherwise, whereas
a dessert containing refined sucrose makes me feel kind of sick. Of
course the dessert contains other things that are paleo-naughty
including wheat, cream, etc.

--Richard  (Tarzana)

Todd Moody wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Ray Audette wrote:
>
>         But the refined sugar does contain things that in nature
>         would not be eaten.  Proteins from the source plant do
>         find their way into the final product (refining them out
>         completely would be prohibitedly expensive.  This would
>         include grass proteins from the sugar cane, or beet
>         proteins from sugar beet.
>
> Since sugar cane can be chewed raw for its sugary sweetness, this
> particular protein must be considered "paleo".  The grass is not
> completely chewed and swallowed, of course, but it is chewed
> enough so that a small amount of protein would be ingested.  It
> is rather comparable to drinking tea, which you allow.  Brewing
> the tea certainly leeches some proteins into your teacup, but
> nobody ever actually ate tea leaves.  They may have chewed them,
> however.
>
>         Of course, sugar in this concentration would never be
>         found in nature.  Even the sweetest fruits contain highly
>         diluted sugars - that's why we don't extract sugars from
>         them except in the form of fruit-juice concentrates.
>
> In what concentration, as in a can of Pepsi or a serving of
> bacon?  We were speaking of the latter.  A serving of bacon
> contains less than a gram of sugar.  An orange contains over five
> grams of sucrose.  If you were thinking of something like the
> Pepsi, which has about 35g of sugar, then I agree that it is
> difficult to find this concentration in nature.
>
>         Thanks to government policy in the U.S., most food
>         products are sweetened with corn fructose.
>
> True, but this is not true of bacon, which is not "sweetened"
> but cured with sugar.
>
> Todd Moody
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