Welcome to The Sugar Dial Down! We’re here to help you transition to a healthier relationship with sugar, one dish at a time. We take advantage of the fact that our taste buds are dynamic. In other words, you can actually adapt your sense of taste to enjoy food with lower levels of sweetness. So, to help you there, we provide recipes that allow you to steadily reduce the levels of sugar. If you’re taking your partner and/or children on this journey to a healthier life with you, then making that gradual transition means you’re all adjusting, and ideally, not even noticing the gradual step-down as your taste buds shift to a preference for lower sweetness.

One of the reasons we’ve developed this website is because we would find it so challenging to find reduced sugar recipes on the internet that didn’t sub in artificial or ‘non-nutritive’ sweeteners (like Stevia). As a rule, none of the recipes on The Sugar Dial Down use artificial/non-nutritive sweeteners. For one, we have concerns about the long-term health effects of some of these ingredients, such as the higher risk for stroke and heart disease. Our philosophy is that humans have lived on no-added-sugar diets for most of their evolution – so, let’s get closer to the diet our bodies evolved for. Plus, there are plenty of other website that offer recipes that reduce sugar using non-nutritive sweeteners.

There may be yet another reason though that recipes using lower amounts of natural sweetener are hard to come by, and that’s that, for the larger population, they’re just not going to cut it for them and would likely result in poor reviews for the recipe blogger. Virtually all the recipes on the internet cater to the typical food consumer, and that’s understandable. As your tastebuds adapt to lower levels of sugar, you’ll start to deviate from this group. What you will eventually find perfectly fine in terms of sweetness as you adapt, many others will likely find just not sweet enough.

Be assured, though, that we’re not aiming for bland recipes here. When sugar becomes a smaller part of the taste equation, it actually opens up the chance to explore the fuller palate of flavor that comes from other ingredients, such as warm spices, herbs and fruit. And as the taste of a dish is less overwhelmingly sweet, you’ll start to notice all those other elements of a dish that give it its distinct taste.

Please feel free to reach out if you’re looking for the lower sugar version of a recipe you haven’t found in your recipe search. We’ll add it to our list. Here’s to Healthy and Happy Eating!

– The Sugar Dial Down