The festive season has officially arrived, and Indian kitchens are once again coming alive with preparations of laddus, payasam, halwa, burfis, and other traditional sweets. With the rising awareness about the impact of sugar, however, some ingredients in popular sweets are being changed. Refined sugar is increasingly being replaced with jaggery, while some consumers are also experimenting with artificial sweeteners such as stevia, and of late, monk fruit sweetener.

The intention is understandable: enjoy festive food while reducing sugar use. The science behind these sweeteners however, is more nuanced. Not every alternative to sugar is nutritionally equivalent, and ‘natural’ does not automatically mean low-sugar. The important question is not simply what sweetener is being used, but how much sweetness and sugars a person consumes overall.

Jaggery has long been associated with traditional Indian cooking and is often perceived as a healthier alternative to refined sugar because it undergoes less refining and may retain small amounts of minerals. However, it remains a concentrated source of sugar.

This distinction becomes particularly important during festivals, when sweets are rarely eaten in isolation. A person may have a laddu, a serving of payasam/kheer, sweetened beverages and several savoury foods in the same day, or worse in a single meal.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that free sugars contribute less than 10% of total daily energy intake, with a further reduction to below 5% providing additional health benefits. For a person consuming around 2,000 calories a day, 5% is roughly 20 to 25 grams, or 4 to 5 teaspoons of sugar.

Therefore, replacing sugar with jaggery does not make a sweet sugar-free. From a doctor’s perspective, portion size and the total amount of free sugar consumed during the day remain far more important than whether the sweetener is brown or white.

Across the country, many people are now using low-calorie or no-calorie sweeteners. These include artificial sweeteners such as sucralose, saccharin and aspartame, as well as naturally derived sweeteners such as steviol glycosides and monk fruit extract.

Monk fruit extract, the newest addition to sweeteners in the mass market, is particularly interesting because its sweetness comes from compounds called mogrosides. Monk fruit extracts can be approximately 100 to 250 times sweeter than sugar, depending on their mogroside content. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has noted that the use of monk fruit extract is ‘generally recognised as safe’ under its intended conditions of use.

Artificial sweeteners work differently. They provide intense sweetness with little or no calories and are commonly used in products marketed as ‘sugar-free’, ‘light’ or ‘diet’. Approved high-intensity sweeteners are considered safe within their specified conditions of use, and several have established acceptable daily intake levels.

However, a ‘safe’ label does not necessarily mean beneficial. The World Health Organization currently advises against relying on non-sugar sweeteners as a strategy for long-term weight control. Its recommendation is conditional and is based on evidence that replacing free sugars with non-sugar sweeteners does not provide a clear long-term benefit for reducing body fat.

This is an important distinction for consumers. A sweetener can be safe to consume and still not be a reason to increase the amount of sweet food in the diet.

The biggest misconception is that changing the sweetener automatically changes the nutritional quality of the sweet.

A jaggery laddu is still sweet. A sugar-free dessert can be calorie-dense if it contains large amounts of ghee, nuts, cream or other ingredients. Similarly, replacing sugar with monk fruit does not make an otherwise highly processed dessert a health food.

The more useful approach is for us to look at our entire festive eating pattern. One traditional sweet enjoyed occasionally is very different from consuming several servings every day throughout the season. The goal is not to find a sweetener that allows unlimited sweetness; it should be to reduce excessive sweets while retaining the cultural and social pleasure associated with festivals.

So, if a festival sweet is made with sugar, moderation matters. If it is made with jaggery, moderation still matters. Monk fruit essence or other non-sugar sweeteners do not automatically bestow a license to eat more.

The aim should be not to move from sugar to jaggery or from jaggery to monk fruit. It should be to simply learn to enjoy our favourite sweets alittle less sweet, and a little less often. This also aligns with broader dietary recommendations from the WHO that advise building diets on minimally and unprocessed foods, and restricting free sugars.

There is no need to cut out every single sweet, but do practice portion control and choose wisely. Instead of five laddus, have one and enjoy it mindfully. Keep the overall diet rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains and fibre, and let sweets remain a small part of the meal.

(Suparna Mukherjee is a dietician with Narayana Health City, Bengaluru. suparna.mukherjee@narayanahealth.org)