I came across an article titled “Xylitol, the Unnatural Sweetener” by Sándor Meleg on a friend’s website. At first, I had the impression that this, too, was going to bash poor xylitol and take the dark-green side in the natural vs. artificial debate. I’ll admit, the thought even crossed my mind that the author, dietitian Sándor Meleg, had been bought off wholesale by the cane sugar lobby, since he writes things like:

Contents hide

3 The Fight Against Aspartame

3.1 Sources

“It is not extracted from its natural source, but produced using chemical-fermentation methods.”

One needs to be careful with such sentences! The average reader’s nerves twitch immediately when they see that something they are being fed is made “by chemical methods.” Of course, most people don’t understand the word fermentation either, but they sense that it must be something bad. So, what is chemical fermentation, anyway?

Fermentation is the same process by which Tokaj wine and beer are made, and even sauerkraut and pickles.

Of course, the xylitol sold in stores is produced artificially. Honestly now: did anyone actually believe that “birch sugar” comes from birch trees? In such quantities, at that price? No, it’s nothing like maple syrup…

Then, as I read on, it turned out that only the beginning was misleading; later, the article clearly puts xylitol in its proper place and argues against nonsense. The idea that xylitol is unhealthy or dangerous is just as much nonsense as the miracle healing power of “artisanal birch sugar.” So it’s worth reading!

An important point it makes is that, based on domestic corn production, Hungary could become a regional market leader in xylitol manufacturing—but instead of developing this, we’re mourning our closed sugar factories.

Yet xylitol is good. At least, it’s much better than beet or cane sugar if we like sweets. Of course, we could just give up the pleasure of sweetness altogether—it’s not that hard. For example, I often drink tea and coffee without sugar, especially when I want to mess with a guest: “Sorry, no sugar, we drink it without… but I can give you a little condensed milk.”

It’s a proven fact that xylitol’s glycemic index (its ability to raise blood sugar) is much lower than cane sugar’s, making it a better sweetener for diabetics as well. It reduces tooth decay, dry mouth, plaque buildup, and even the risk of respiratory infections. According to the WHO and FAO, the recommended intake for humans is “not specified,” meaning there is no upper limit—it can be consumed in any desired amount. In very large doses (200 g), it can rarely cause hypoglycemia, but no one could possibly eat that much under normal circumstances. Test subjects have eaten as much as 1.5 kg per month or even 430 g per day without any harmful effects. Like many other sugar alcohols, xylitol can have a laxative effect if consumed in large quantities (above 65 g per day), but the body adapts to this within a week or two, and the effect disappears.[i]

It’s Dangerous for Dogs!

The article mentions that it’s dangerous for dogs, which is absolutely true. Ingestion causes a drastic rise in insulin levels in dogs, which in turn leads to a fatal drop in blood sugar. If a dog eats xylitol, symptoms include loss of coordination, vomiting, lethargy, seizures, and coma, followed by death due to liver failure. Even as little as 500–1000 mg per kilogram of body weight can cause fatal hypoglycemia[ii]. But the dog doesn’t die because xylitol is a poison—it’s because its body overreacts to this type of sugar. Hypoglycemia usually occurs in diabetics, but it can also be triggered in healthy humans by excessive caffeine or alcohol consumption, prolonged fasting, or intense physical exertion.

If your dog has eaten something with xylitol (like gum), rush it to the vet!

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals once assumed that xylitol was toxic to cats as well, causing similar symptoms as in dogs. However, while xylitol poisoning cases in dogs have been on the rise, cases in cats are virtually nonexistent. Researchers initially thought cats might instinctively avoid foods containing xylitol. But according to the latest data from the Animal Poison Control toxicology database, xylitol is not toxic to cats—it does not cause low blood sugar or liver damage. Previous claims in the literature were based on extrapolations from dog data and turned out to be false[iii].

This doesn’t mean owners should start feeding xylitol to their cats—it just means the extreme caution needed with dogs isn’t necessary for cats.

The Cane Sugar Lobby

Since I mentioned the cane sugar lobby, let me point out that it is clearly pushing hard in the market. Chemically, cane sugar is exactly the same as beet sugar: sucrose. Brown cane sugar is made by recoloring white refined sugar with molasses, because the brown color creates a sense of naturalness in consumers and thus sells better. Sucrose, in the quantities commonly consumed, can indeed be harmful to health.

Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind that [cane/beet] sugar is more dangerous than gunpowder, since more people die prematurely from sugar-related diseases each year than from armed conflicts.

Manufacturers know this perfectly well, yet they keep pushing it, making them no better than tobacco companies or drug dealers. The only difference is that while drug dealers are hunted by the law, sugar producers legally hand out sweet poison to children.

And while we’re at it, it’s ultimately the cane sugar lobby, not the EU, that is responsible for the closure of Hungary’s sugar factories. In 1968, the European Economic Community introduced a sugar regime that, on the one hand, allowed Europe to become self-sufficient in sugar (justified by wartime experience), and on the other hand, “ensured fair income” for European producers. Ensuring a “fair income” can also be called unfair market interference—at least from the perspective of a Caribbean sugarcane plantation owner—since it meant artificially high intervention prices maintained by government policy. The result was that importing sugar into Europe became practically pointless.[iv]

KÃ©ptalÃ¡lat a kÃ¶vetkezÅre: âabandoned sugar plantationâ — The ruins of the Old Koloa Sugar Mill in Kōloa, Hawaii are now considered a National Historic Landmark. The sugar mill, which thrived until the end of World War II, was permanently shut down in 1996 after the company accumulated $60 million in debt.

Sugar producers in the Third World went bankrupt one after another. If you Google the phrase “abandoned sugar plantation,” you’ll find plenty of ruined haciendas for sale. For the price of a suburban house near Budapest, you can buy a multi-hectare estate in the Caribbean, complete with a small mansion, beach, or mountain view and even a waterfall—except you can’t really get there, and it’s useless to you anyway. Eventually, the big sugarcane-producing countries—Australia, Thailand, and Brazil—had enough and, in 2002, started whining to the World Trade Organization (WTO) about the EU’s sugar regime. In 2006, a decision was made, and the EU was forced to change its policy.[v]

They lowered the intervention price for sugar and created a restructuring fund (financed by the much-criticized sugar quota). The goal was not to suddenly flood the European market with cheap cane sugar overnight, leaving sugar factory workers and beet farmers destitute, but rather to allow the industry time to restructure, retrain, and create new jobs. In Hungary, there were 12 sugar factories operating at the time of the regime change; by 2006, only five remained (Kaba, Kaposvár, Petőháza, Szerencs, and Szolnok), and now only the one in Kaposvár is left. In return, the country received 627 million euros in support—good question where that went…[vi]

What most people lamenting the closure of sugar factories don’t know is that the French company Béghin-Say SA only bought three sugar factories (Hatvan, Szolnok, and Szerenc) and held shares in the Selyp Sugar Factory Co. The Selyp (Lőrinci) plant had to be shut down for economic reasons as early as 1998; the other three were sold in 2003 to the German Nordzucker AG, even before Béghin-Say itself was sold to the Tereos Group. So they simply went bankrupt. Nordzucker’s Hungarian subsidiary, Mátra Cukor Zrt., continued sugar production until 2008, when the Szerencs plant was closed due to a shortage of raw material (no beet: their EU quota was 100,000 tons of sugar, which required 700,000 tons of beet, but producers could only deliver 200,000 tons). The Kaba sugar factory ended up owned by the Anglo-French Eastern Sugar Zrt., which has since ceased to exist. The factory was on the market for ten years without success until a Slovak investor bought it last year.

Another five sugar factories (Ács, Ercsi, Mezőhegyes, Sarkad, and Sárvár) merged under the name Magyar Cukor Zrt. and operated under Hungarian ownership until 1996, when they were sold to the Austrian Agrana Group, which repeatedly injected capital into the company struggling with severe liquidity problems, only to finally give up and shut down all plants except Kaposvár. The Kaposvár factory is still owned by Magyar Cukor Zrt., in which Agrana holds a majority stake. Of Hungary’s 400,000-ton sugar quota, 300,000 tons were returned to the EU; the remaining 100,000 tons are produced at Kaposvár, but the country’s annual need is about 300,000 tons. It’s worth noting that Kaposvár also processes sugarcane imported partly from Africa. Beet cultivation would not be profitable even now without EU agricultural subsidies, so after 2020 it cannot be relied upon.[vii]

Given this background, it was amusing to hear recently that upon news of the EU’s sugar quota system being permanently abolished this September, Minister of Agriculture Sándor Fazekas immediately envisioned a second golden age for the Hungarian sugar industry. Of course—as usual—media professionals as well-informed as the minister promptly picked up and trumpeted the news, and a few “analysts” also seized the moment to make themselves heard by spouting a couple of suitably optimistic empty phrases about the new situation. Naturally, nothing happened; the market situation hasn’t changed. Hungarian sugar beet is expensive—more expensive than German beet—because it doesn’t rain enough here, so beets have to be irrigated. And irrigation requires not just water but also electricity, which is costly. Ergo, Hungarian beet and thus Hungarian sugar are uncompetitive. According to serious experts, the potential lies in corn-based isoglucose production (and similarly in xylitol production), but given the country’s conditions, sugar beet is a dead end.[viii] Let’s hope someone eventually informs the minister of this.

The Fight Against Aspartame

After 2020, the future of EU agricultural subsidies is uncertain, and so are sugar tariffs. By then, cane sugar producers will be working hard to secure their market. Their biggest competitor now is not beet sugar but artificial sweeteners and the newly popular alternative sugars, such as xylitol. That’s why they are trying everything, including spreading claims that these substances are harmful. The biggest campaign so far was the hype about aspartame’s alleged carcinogenic effect.

The truth is that there is no evidence whatsoever that aspartame is carcinogenic or toxic—apart from press statements by a shady and, most likely, well-paid Italian professor. It’s worth noting that scientific findings are not first announced on public TV but published in peer-reviewed journals. If a professor with a dubious background, who received his status and scientific “credentials” from his own foundation, just blurts out something on TV, that’s highly suspicious.

The phrase “there’s no evidence” is often interpreted by laypeople as “scientists don’t know yet, they have no proof, so it still might be true, better safe than sorry.” Well, dear lay friends, in plain language, “there’s no evidence” or “no scientific experiment supports this” means it isn’t true. The claim that aspartame is poisonous is nothing more than an urban legend, and reports saying otherwise are fabrications.[ix] I say this despite the fact that aspartame was marketed under the name NutraSweet by Monsanto—the company infamous for its genetically modified crops—and Monsanto isn’t my favorite either (not because of GMOs, but because of their occasionally aggressive market tactics).[x]

It seems they partly succeeded in knocking out aspartame. Coca-Cola, for example, once did everything it could to explain to consumers that the rumors about aspartame were false [xi], but lately there have been reports that they are discontinuing Coca-Cola Zero because it “doesn’t taste enough like Coke.” The truth is that the sugar-free beverage market has seen a 27% decline over the past five years, clearly as a result of the anti-artificial-sweetener hysteria. Of course, the big question is what the company will ultimately do, since there is a significant market segment (which includes me) that refuses to drink sugary crap, and PepsiCo seems completely unfazed by Coca-Cola’s announcement.[xii]

I strongly suspect that after discrediting aspartame and other artificial sweeteners, the cane sugar lobby has found its next target: xylitol—and they’ve discovered the perfect tool to achieve this: the hordes of idiots unleashed on the internet.