By Wendy McMillan

Walk into Mani’s,a popular Los Angeles bakery, and the chocolate-filled cookies, rich brownies, and cakes might have you mentally kissing your healthy eating habits good-bye. But stick around long enough and you’ll discover that the delicious-looking sweets lining the cases in front of you don’t have a bit of refined sugar in them. Instead, they’re made with molasses, agave nectar, fruit juice concentrate, and other all-natural sugar substitutes. What’s more, Mani Niall, the bakery’s founder and author of Sweet! (Perseus Books, 2008) maintains that these natural sweeteners are healthy and easy ingredients to use when you’re baking.

“Using alternatives to sugar can actually make your favorite dessert recipes taste much different—in a good way,” he says. “They can be richer, with surprising and more interesting textures.”

Good news, since dietitians agree that getting too much sugar can wreak havoc on your health. Sugar not only ramps up your glycemic load, causing spikes and crashes in your blood glucose levels that leave you feeling sapped, it’s also a nutritionally “empty” food. In other words, it’s completely devoid of nutrients and lacks the enzymes the body needs to metabolize it. The result? Sugar taxes the digestive system in ways it wasn’t meant to be taxed. Add to that sugar’s high calorie count (and the other high-calorie ingredients it’s often paired with), and you’ve got a food that should be eaten only in moderation.

But we do love our sugar, and most of us eat far too much of it. Research shows that many of us get a whopping 325 calories of the sweet stuff each day. And while we may think it’s only hard to avoid sugar this time of year, most of us consume much more of it than we think year-round. “Hidden sources of sugar have a way of creeping into our shopping carts,” says Tara Gidus, RD, a nutritionist in Orlando, Florida. “Breads, marinara sauce, salad dressings, ketchup, and many beverages are often loaded with processed and added sugars, making it crucial to read labels.”

OK, so too much sugar is bad for us, but how can anyone cut back now with Thanksgiving and the holidays—and their sweet temptations—right around the corner? “These natural alternatives to sugar contain important nutrients and minerals that promote health and also help digestion,” says Thomas S. Lee, NMD, a naturopathic physician in Reno, Nevada. Even better? There’s a good chance they’ll make your grandmother’s pumpkin pie or gingerbread cookie recipe tastier than ever too.

Molasses
The king of nutritious natural sweeteners, molasses is the thick syrup that remains after all the nutrients have been “refined” out of the sugar cane and beets. These are no ordinary leftovers, however. Blackstrap molasses has more calcium than milk, more iron than eggs, and more potassium than any other food, and it’s an excellent source of B vitamins. Other nutrients in molasses include copper, manganese, phosphorus, magnesium, pantothenic acid, and vitamin E. Although blackstrap molasses contains the most vitamins and minerals, Niall cautions to use it sparingly, unless specifically called for in a recipe. “Blackstrap has a very strong flavor and can be overpowering—a few tablespoons usually suffice,” he says. “Regular molasses is great for adding a moist, chewy texture, like in gingersnaps.” It also works as