What is Sorbitol?

To say I'm a big fan of sugar free syrup is an understatement. While regular syrup contains a whopping 200ish calories per serving, sugar free varieties only have about 20-25. When I first discovered it, my first reaction was that it's too good to be true, but I mixed it up in oatmeal for at least a year before I decided to see what the stuff was actually made of. Something told me it hadn't come straight from a maple tree.

I grabbed my Log Cabin bottle, complete with a snowy log cabin picture on the label and capital letters stating, "A Family Tradition Since 1887." So far, so good. However, as I suspected, when I turned the bottle around to look at the ingredient list, the list contained at least 10 items of junk I'd never heard of. Fortunately, as obsessed I am with reading labels, for better or worse I tend to ignore anything that follows the words, "Contains 2% or less of." I feel like this keeps me from being too much of a health food fanatic. I'm too groovy to be fanatic about anything.

Anyway, this only left me with two ingredients to concern myself with, water and sorbitol. Water is good, obviously, but what the heck is sorbitol? I did a little research on the subject and this is what I found out.

Sorbitol, also called glucitol, is a sugar alcohol. It is very slow to be metabolized and does not cause insulin levels to spike as much as sugar.  It is found in fruits such as apples, pears, peaches, and prunes. It also can be derived from corn and seaweed. Sorbitol is generally considered to be safe, although large amounts of it may cause digestion problems due to it being a natural laxative. As a sugar substitute it's often found in lite of sugar free foods.

So my conclusion is that sorbitol is safe and the sugar free syrup will stay in my pantry!