WHEN you get to be a dinosaur like me you get conscious about food especially if the most evident bequest from your genealogy is diabetes milletus.
I have friends and mentors who recently substituted sugar with sachets of stevia. Derived from a plant native to Paraguay and Brazil, stevia is calorie-free and 200 times sweeter than sugar. But it can be expensive--- a pack of 100 tablets can cost almost a thousand pesos.
In one of my trips to what I have been calling “parts unknown”, I have discovered a sugar substitute from kaong. Kaong, arenga pinnata or sweet palm, has multiple uses like all other palms. However, it has become popular because it is a common ingredient of the Filipino version of the fruit salad.
A kaong palm tree can grow as high as 40 to 60 feet. Each tree is said to produce 5,000 to 7,000 of the oblong “salad seeds” which are actually the fruits or endosperm. Since it is similar to coconuts its fibre can also be turned into sturdy rope and the other parts can be used for furniture. Just like the coconut, a kaong palm takes almost 10 years to mature. This is probably why in areas like Agusan Sur, farmers would rather plant oil palms because after 5 years the fruit clusters can be harvested and sold for palm oil production.
When kaong is tapped for its sap, it can be processed into tuba, and vinegar, and yes, sugar.
Kaong sugar is similar to coco sugar. It is sweet yet leaves a slight oily taste that’s a bit different from coco sugar because of a caramel after taste. I was told that kaong sugar also has a low glycemic index (GI) and data from DOST shows that its GI value is at 40--- five points higher than coco sugar.
It is an acquired taste to use substitute cane sugar with lower GI sweeteners but dinosaurs on two legs have to attain that taste and pass it on to progeny to improve the line, so to speak. I have read somewhere that dinosaurs have become extinct because they have not learned to adapt to the changing planet. I am adapting, of course.