Who doesn’t love sweet food? There are a lot of options for you to go if you want to sweeten your food. Other than the fairly ubiquitous “processed” sugar, you can try brown sugar, jaggery, honey, and more.
Of them, a prominent one is a jaggery. Jaggery has been in use for thousands of years and it is said to provide numerous health benefits than processed sugar.
While processed sugar is heavily processed from sugarcane and is left only with sucrose, jaggery is relatively less processed and is only composed of the majority of sucrose and other proteins, vitamins, and minerals. These extra nutrients make jaggery have numerous health benefits and uses.
In this article, let us pit jaggery against sugar and try to understand what’s best for you. Let us start with discussing health benefits:
Health Benefits of Jaggery:
The list of health benefits of jaggery is huge and we are only discussing prominent ones here. You may be expecting weight loss here, so let’s discuss that one first.
But there is one good thing with jaggery. Jaggery has low calories. So, it adds sweetness to your diet but has low calories so you don’t end up adding surprising weight.
You actually cannot remove sugar completely from your diet. But jaggery helps you pampering your sweet tooth by actually not putting you on weights.
Helps in treating respiratory issues:
Jaggery helps in clearing the respiratory tract and clears the dust particles. It sends them to lymph nodes where they are ultimately expelled.
Also, jaggery is quite known for its ability to help cure common colds. As such jaggery is commonly recommended to be eaten in winter times. It also helps you generate heat in your body. Hence, it is recommended to avoid consuming honey during summer as it may also lead to some heat issues like nose bleeding.
Purifies blood:
Jaggery is a blood purification agent and as such is useful in treating skin issues. It can also help in reducing hypertension.
It is iron-rich so it helps anemia patients significantly.
Improves digestion and reduces fatigue:
Jaggery helps in reducing flatulence and also, helps in giving immediate relief to people with acidity problems by balancing the pH level of the blood.
The composition of Jaggery also helps in relaxing the muscles and thus relieving fatigue.
Health benefits of processed sugar:
Technically, processed sugar contains just sucrose as such, we cannot associate it with many health benefits. But only with one which is to help in a rapid increase in blood glucose level than jaggery. This rapid increase is needed at times when blood sugar is very low. As sugar is more refined than jaggery, it is absorbed near instantaneously into the body than jaggery which contains other materials.
Health issues:
As jaggery contains a lot of sugar, the health issues associated with it. People who have restrictions for high sugar intake, their restrictions also apply to high jaggery intake.
You may already know that taking in higher levels of sugar would cause blood sugar levels to increase which causes a plethora of problems.
The range of problems with taking jaggery not only depends on the composition but also the way it is prepared and the time it is taken.
We have already seen that jaggery can help you a lot in winter times and clear cold. But when it is eaten heavily in summer times, it is observed to cause nose bleeding. If the jaggery you are eating is prepared in an unhygienic way, then there is a high chance that it would cause parasitic infections.
Conclusion:
From all of the discussion above, you can clearly see that jaggery contains a lot of health benefits than sugar, and Switching from sugar to jaggery is an excellent choice!
However, you must take jaggery with extreme caution and use only properly prepared jaggery at recommended times and amounts.
