Eli5: if sugar found in natural fruits doesnt get absorbed quickly by bloodstream due to fiber, then why not companies incorporate fiber to their chocolate so it doesnt spike our blood sugar?
In: Biology
It would change the feel of the chocolate, and likely its flavor too. As chocolate is a luxury food meant for its flavor/texture over any health effects, it is very likely that a chocolate that added fiber would be less popular, and thus less profitable, than a chocolate that doesn’t add it. You’ve just made your chocolate more expensive to make, only to earn less money from it.
(There’s a good chance it would also mess up the production, but I don’t know enough about chocolate chemistry to say one way or another.)
There are lots of companies that do that. Fiber One is the most well known. People generally don’t think those bars taste as good as regular chocolate bars.
Because that would make them taste weird, and it wouldn’t solve the actual problem which is chocolate and candy have far too much sugar in them.
Adding fiber to a lot of candy, soda, or chocolate wouldn’t make them much healthier. That skirts around the core issue that such products have too much sugar in them to begin with and are inherently unhealthy.
It’s not a question of working around the problem, the problem is we eat too much sugar and we need to stop doing that.
Fruit juice in some ways can be just as bad as soda because they contain concentrated sugar. Their association with health and the vitamins they contain is actually the result of clever marketing.
Albert Lasker was a marketing genius responsible for changing the American diet for the worse. The amount of damage he did to the average Americans health with his marketing campaigns is rather astonishing.
Orange Juice was created as an excuse to process excess and unsellable oranges and Lasker found a way to market it as a healthy breakfast drink when it really wasn’t…
The answer isn’t to make Orange Juice healthier, it’s to drink less of it or stop drinking it entirely.
The same goes with candy and chocolate.
The exact idea you’re describing [was patented](https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2119369A2/en) in 2009 by a company that doesn’t appear to exist. The only [data](https://uscorporates.com/business/tx/houston/texas-peanut-butter-eggs-inc/976901) I can find on it lists Daniel (the same guy on the patent) as the Director and President, and the listed address for the company is [a house in houston.](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/11518-Meadowchase-Dr-Houston-TX-77065/28461045_zpid/) The Fadi Aramouni listed on the patent [seems to be this guy](https://www.asi.k-state.edu/about/people/faculty/aramouni/) who does weird food experiments at Kansas state, so maybe send Dr. Aramouni an e-mail to find out what happened with their fiber-enriched chocolate bars idea, I guess
Firstly, your initial proposition is not entirely correct. Sugars found in fruit like an apple take a lot of forms, and some of those forms are naturally harder to digest than others, meaning it can take longer for the sugar to be broken down and added to your bloodstream. It is not just because an apple has fiber in it (and it should be noted that ‘fiber’ is not a single type of thing either; if you eat a fiber supplement to help with constipation you are eating something very different than what you would find in an apple).
Second, there is no strong incentive for a compony to avoid blood sugar spikes. Mars doesn’t really care if eating a Snickers gives you a sugar rush. There may be some smaller chocolate makers that produce candy specifically for people with dietary concerns who would want a slower sugar rush, but that’s all. Mars is trying to make a candy bar that tastes really good and really sweet, and adding things like fiber would change the texture and flavor. So they don’t, because they have no reason to.
Large chocolate manufacturers (such as Mars) already over roast their beans and then add _extra_ sugar to compensate, as that is the best way to make their products consistent. If anything, they want you to eat more sugar as it can be addictive and they want you to buy more of their products
There are many types of sugar out there, and they all behave differently.
Fructose, sucrose, and glucose are three major ones people think of as “sugar”. All of them affect the body in complex ways. The way they’re processed isn’t in isolation, the other foods you eat it with (such as foods with lots of fiber) also change how the sugars are absorbed and used.
Fructose is plentiful in fruits. Glucose is the sugar measured in blood sugar, so the different chemical arrangement of fructose doesn’t cause it to spike even though it is still a sugar. Fructose is metabolized in the liver, and, it still has health impacts by increasing cholesterol and triglycerides plus increases cardiovascular health risks, to name a few things.
There is plenty of chocolate out there that don’t spike blood sugar. Different chocolate blends impact sugar differently, dark chocolate versus light chocolate, candies like 70% cocoa chocolate balls versus chocolate covered caramel and toffee. Even then, simple moderation is enough for most diabetics to enjoy chocolate treats.
FYI – it doesn’t have to be fiber. I’ve found that protein works best at decreasing the intensity of the glucose spike (so the spike is prolonged but shorter). Fat also works. When I had gestational diabetes I was taking my blood glucose at 1 and 2 hour intervals after meals. My experience was that I could eat a little ice cream without my blood glucose getting too high if I also added 10-15 nuts with it. But yeah, no company is going to care about decreasing the glycemic index of their sugary product.
Having been diabetic for over thirty years, I’m pretty sure (and dietitians agree) that chocolate is too fatty to spike sugar like sugary drinks do, thus it’s not very good at fixing a hypoglycemia.
Most consumers want their candy to taste really sweet and many consumers want candy to give them a nice buzz of happiness. If they added a bunch of fiber, they’d ruin the candy bar’s ability to give that to consumers.
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