Sweetener from tequila plant lowers blood sugar

A sweetener that doesn’t raise blood sugar? While it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t - researchers are suggesting that a sweetener created from the agave plant could lower blood glucose levels and help obese people lose weight.

The agave plant (from which tequila is made) contains agavins, a natural form of sugar, which are non-digestible and can act as a dietary fibre.

“We have found that since agavins reduce glucose levels and increase GLP-1, they also increase the amount of insulin,” said Mercedes G López, PhD. GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) is a hormone that slows the stomach from emptying, thereby stimulating production of insulin.

“Agavins are not expensive and they have no known side effects, except for those few people who cannot tolerate them,” López said. In addition, agavins, like other fructans, are the best sugars to help support growth of healthful microbes in the mouth and intestines, she said.

Agavins can also help people feel fuller, which could help them eat less, said López, who is with the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados, Biotechnology and Biochemistry Irapuato, in Guanajuato, Mexico.

While fructose has attracted some bad press, particularly in the health community, López says that agavins are fructans, which are fructoses linked together in long, branched chains. Since the human body can’t use them in this configuration, they don’t affect blood sugar.

Agavins are not to be confused with agave nectar or agave syrup, which are commonly found in health food stores. These products contain fructans that have been broken down into individual fructose molecules.

While agavins do not cause side effects like artificial sweeteners, they are not quite as sweet as their artificial counterparts, López says.

To test agavins’ effects on blood sugar, López’s team fed a group of mice a standard diet, adding agavins to the water of half the mice in the study. They weighed the mice daily and checked their blood glucose levels weekly. Most mice that drank agavins ate less, lost weight and had decreased blood glucose levels compared with other sweeteners such as glucose, fructose, sucrose, agave syrup and aspartame.

López presented the results of the study at the 247th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Dallas. The study was supported by Mondelez International and Agavaceae Produce.