I'm pretty much a low-carb gal which makes me pretty much sugarfree. I use stevia and erythritol for most things, both of which are "natural" sweeteners if you believe what you read!
I don't worry too much about the beer because I drink maybe 4 a week, and much of the sugar is consumed by the yeast as it does its fermentation thang. Not sure exactly how much is left but ya know - ya picks your battles.
Since I've been doing this more than ten years, I have a pretty good feel for using the sugar substitutes and have used most of them. All stevias are not created equal - I've bought some that were truly awful, and some I like - my favorite being NuNaturals NuStevia No Carbs blend, which is stevia and erythritol together. Having two or more sweeteners in combination creates a nice synergistic effect and they balance each other out, more often than not.
I like the erythritol because you can get at least SOME mimicing of sugar's properties when baking - by itself though it is only 70 to 80% as sweet as sugar, and has a "cooling effect" - rather like a menthol cough drop - in the mouth. Combining it with the stevia mitigates most of that cooling sensation if not all, and lets me punch up the sweetness by adding enough stevia to it to get the level of sweet I want.
I also still use - gasp - Splenda at times, like for making jams and jellies and bread & butter pickles and such. I bought up a ton of their QuickPacks before they discontinued them, because they're a highly concentrated powder (1 tsp = 1 cup sugar for sweetness) and not a lot of dextrose filler as the Splenda that measures cup for cup like sugar.
Like anything else - it's all about choices. Having read a lot on the subject, I just choose not to ingest any more refined sugar than needed, and usually stick to lower starch veggies. We sprout, dehydrate, and grind our own hard red winter wheat to make bread, which we still eat sparingly. We avoid most pastas and potatoes, but we do like quinoa and beans and occasionally a little brown rice.
I'm not quite as hard-core about it as I was ten years ago but still believe that many of the illnesses we see today have to do with the amount of sugars and other highly-processed foods in our diets.
There. Now aren't ya glad ya asked?
