Is raw sugar any better for me than regular sugar?
No. Except for a slight difference in color, they’re the same thing. In fact, unless you’ve actually been to a sugarcane field and sucked on a fresh stalk, you’ve never had true raw sugar. That’s a good thing. “It contains impurities [dirt and decomposition] that make it unsafe to eat,” says Lisa Tartamella-Kimmel, M.S., R.D., the outpatient nutrition coordinator at Yale-New Haven Hospital, in Connecticut. The “raw” sugar served up in little brown packets is, in fact, what’s left after the cane juice evaporates and impurities are removed. Further processing turns it into the white table variety, but the nutritional value does not change. All sugars have 16 calories and 4 to 5 grams of carbohydrates per teaspoon. “People assume that processing affects sugar in the same way it affects grains,” says Tartamella-Kimmel. “It doesn’t. Gram for gram, sugar is pure carbohydrate—no matter which variety you choose.”
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