Every few weeks someone asks why our laddus are not marketed as diabetic-friendly. They are made with millets. They are sweetened with jaggery rather than refined sugar. Surely that is the whole pitch?
It is not, and we would rather explain why than quietly take the sale.
Jaggery is sugar
Jaggery — vellam, gur — is concentrated sugarcane juice. It is less refined than white sugar and keeps small amounts of minerals that refining strips out. That part is true.
What usually gets left off is what it does to blood glucose. Measured glycemic index values for cane jaggery generally land around 84 — high, and notably higher than white sugar at around 65. A frequently cited comparison of sugars reported jaggery at 84.1 against sucrose at 69.2.
Read that again, because it is the opposite of what the health-food aisle implies. On the measure people actually care about, jaggery does not beat sugar. It performs slightly worse.
The trace minerals are real. They are also present in quantities far too small to offset the sugar they arrive with.
What this means for our laddus
All thirteen of our laddus contain jaggery. Therefore:
- We do not call them low-glycemic.
- We do not call them low-GI.
- We do not call them diabetic-friendly.
- We do not imply it with softer words either.
They are a sweet food. A good one, we think — dense, made with sprouted grain and real nuts, nothing artificial, a short ingredient list you can read out loud. But a sweet food, to be eaten as one.
If you are managing blood sugar, please treat our laddus the way you would treat any sweet, and take your doctor's advice over any food company's website, including ours.
Where we do use that language
We have three products with no added sugar at all — the sprouted millet porridge mix, the pesarattu mix and the kara adai mix. They are savoury. Those are the only products where we will discuss low-glycemic eating, and even there we are talking about the food, not making a promise about anybody's health.
Why say this out loud
Because the alternative is a health halo, and health halos are how people end up eating three of something under the impression that it is medicine.
We would rather sell you one laddu you understand than three you have been misled about. Our great-grandmothers made these with jaggery because it was the sweetener they had, and because a laddu was a treat — for a festival, a long journey, a child who had done well. Nobody in that kitchen was pretending it was health food.
That is still the honest frame. We are just putting it in writing.
Sources: Glycaemic indices of different sugars, Research Society for the Study of Diabetes in India. General information, not medical advice.
