----- "Ben Liberman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
> At 7:12 PM +0000 4/8/10, Todd Moody wrote: 
> >Dextrose is glucose. Glucose is definitely paleo, since free glucose (in addition to bound glucose in sucrose) is found in fruit. 
> > 
> >Todd Moody 
> 
> I thought refined sugar was sort of non-paleo. Is it OK in this case because it is glucose? 

Once again, we come up against the fact that "paleo" means different things to different people. Glucose was present in some of the foods available to humans and hominids in the paleolithic era, and we have no reason to believe that they never ingested it. Refined sugar, as we usually use that term, is sucrose, a disaccharide of glucose and fructose. Sucrose was also present in paleolithic food. The process of refining it isolates it from virtually every other substance present in the foods in which it was available to paleo people. Does that make in non-paleo? It just depends on who you talk to. But it's not like, say, wheat gluten, because we can say with some confidence that paleo people simply didn't eat gluten at all. It wasn't present in the foods they ate. 

There's a whole class of substances that we may say are paleo in the sense that paleo people probably consumed them when they could, but their ability to do so was sharply limited by the environment. Glucose would fall in that category. I don't doubt for one second that paleo people ate fruit when they could get it. But how often was that? In most environments, not very. And the fruit they could get, while not devoid of glucose (and sucrose, etc), was not oozing with the stuff either. So...paleo or not? We may say that glucose etc. are non-paleo in the amounts and forms that refinement makes possible. Or we may say that they are paleo, but fall into a special "handle with care" category, and must be consumed in small amounts. Either way, the common message is: small amounts. 

In this case, the kefir product that Don Wiss recommended has a few grams of glucose per serving. Is that enough to knock it out of bounds? Personally, I can't see why it should. 

Todd Moody