By Irene Hayton

My health tip for this month was going to be about agave nectar and how it’s a great natural sweetener that would be suitable to use on the Eating Alive Program. I did my research (or so I thought), wrote the Health Tip and was ready to upload it onto this website; but then I read an article on NaturalNews.com titled Agave Nectar, the High Fructose Health Food Fraud.

The author, Rami Nagel, writes: “Agave nectar is advertised as a ‘diabetic friendly,’ raw, and a ‘100% natural sweetener.’ Yet it is none of these. The purpose of this article is to show you that agave nectar is in reality not a natural sweetener but a highly refined form of fructose, more concentrated than the high fructose corn syrup used in sodas. Refined fructose is not a ‘natural’ sugar, and countless studies implicate it as a sweetener that will contribute to disease. Therefore, agave nectar is not a health building product, but rather a deceptively marketed form of a highly processed and refined sweetener.”

While I’m still not sure how accurate the information in this article is, it raises a lot of questions about whether agave nectar really is as safe and as natural as it’s touted to be. So, at this point in time, agave nectar is not something that we can recommend as a natural sweetener on the Eating Alive Program. You can read the whole article by clicking on the following link: http://www.naturalnews.com/024892.html.