Alulose is the sugar that doesn't act like a sugar and might actually be good for your gut. It's a pretty bold statement, but actually that's been substantiated. So I like Alulose. I buy it in a form of syrup when I make pancakes for my kids and you know, we also get it as a sweetener. If ever we need to use it, I think it's a great thing to have. So why is Alulose different? Why is it different than artificial sweeteners? And just to explain that briefly, most artificial sweeteners that we know, you know, you have your sucrose, you have your saccharine, aspartame, all of those. They are not very good for us for many reasons. One of the reasons is they disrupt your gut bacteria. And why is that even important? So you've got bacteria. First of all, there's a lot of these. There's probably more gut bacteria than there's cells in your body. And they have a very specific function when it comes to breakdown and absorption of foods. And you know, they are also a vital component of our general health. If we disrupt the gut bacteria, we get issues. And you know this is antibiotics. One of the side effects of antibiotics is you take an antibiotic. What's one of the first things people get? Well, it killed some good bacteria that you have in there. We know that and people get diarrhea. They get other problems, right? So that's why antibiotics should be only used when indicated. We shouldn't use them all the time because we disrupt those good bacteria and they're important to us. More important. So when we use artificial sweeteners, so they, remember, they don't have any calories. Technically, they do still kind of stimulates centers in our brain. They can still raise or elicit an insulin response. So whenever I talk about fasting, I'm usually saying don't take any sweeteners or anything in the fasting period, right? Good. Now, artificial sweeteners really, really disrupt those gut bacteria as well. And they actually disrupt it in a way where they kind of decrease the good bacteria and allow the bad bacteria to to overgrow. That in itself, well, they might be bloating and all these side effects, you know, but beyond that, it can lead to insulin resistance and obesity. Yes. So when the bad bacteria are, you know, getting the upper hand, what happens is we actually absorb more of the calories that we're eating, specifically carbohydrates. So that's a big issue. So they found that people that have obesity, people that have issues with their weight. A lot of times have an unfavorable balance of these gut bacteria. And they did experiments where they actually transplanted, yeah, and that sounds kind of weird. Good bacteria from a healthy person into the digestive tract of an obese person and they lost weight and they got better because they kind of reestablished this balance. And a lot of times this balance was disrupting the first phase because of all views of sweeteners. So that's a long a side. So anyway, gut bacteria are important. We have a lot of them. And if we disturb them in an unfavorable way, it can lead to insulin resistance, obesity and probably many other diseases. So gut health is huge important for general health. Good. Now, enter alulose. So why is alulose different? So alulose is a monosaccharide. What does that mean? It means a single sugar. So it's one molecule. And then looks kind of like fructose. And fructose is a sugar that I don't like very much at all. I always talk about fruit. In general, you have your vitamins and you have some minerals that are great for you. But the sugar and fruit fructose actually very bad for us because we don't metabolize at the same way as for example glucose. Glucose, you know, citric acid cycle and all these kind of things we talked about energy production. The transport of fructose as it enters our bodies is a bit different. It's a complicated thing. But for all practical purposes and to simplify it, fructose is very easily translated into adding body fat. And that's not a good thing, obviously. So fructose is not very good. Now alulose looks like fructose, but it doesn't act like fructose. So kind of occupies the same receptors. But it doesn't really get in. Actually, most of it just gets excreted. You know, over 97% just goes out, you know, most of it through urine, you know, and some through feces and so on. So we don't really absorb this at all. So it doesn't really spike our insulin. So it doesn't really make us gain weight because you know, again, it doesn't get in the body. It's not an energy currency that we use. Yet it tastes sweet. So that's a great thing about alulose. So you know, again, it's something that goes through and it turns out also that it doesn't as it goes through because it doesn't get absorbed in the digestive tract. As it goes through, it doesn't disturb the digestive tract, but on the contrary, it seems like it actually helps it out because it can increase the amount of free fatty acids we have in the gut. And those are very important because those are the nutrients for the cells in our digestive tract. So it seems like alulose. So not only don't be absorbed, so we don't have to worry necessarily about weight gain from alulose, but also it does something good for the gut as it goes through. And that's a big difference compared to sweeteners, of course. So we can sweeten things. We can enjoy sweet things without causing us to increase the caloric intake and also we do something good for our gut. So again, gut health is very, very important. When you think of alulose, you know, what other issues we might have with it down the line at this point, we don't think there's any downside to it really. It is derived and it's been around since 1940s, usually from corn or from sugar beads. And so it's like, you know, something that's been around for a while, we've looked at this for a while, and we haven't really seen anybody negative impact on alulose on our general health. So besides the, again, syrup that I'm buying, you know, I have it if I need it. Now, here's the caveat on it, with any sweetener, I would say, even alulose, even though I like this one the most of any sweetener, really, don't use it all the time. And the reason is again, if we're trying to follow a low carb diet, or people that say they're on a ketogenic diet, an extreme low carb diet, then giving ourselves sweets, even like alulose, at least on a psychological level, sets us up to crave these things. And that is not necessarily a good thing. So once in a while, if you need to sweeten something, or let's say, you know, if I make ice cream for my kids, you can use, you know, alulose with some heavy whipping cream and some vanilla extract, and you can make a very nice vanilla ice cream. So for a treat once in a while, I think it's a great thing to use, if you're baking something as a substitute, I think it's good to use. Because certainly, you know, it is much more, you know, beneficial than other sugars, you know. And in terms of other sugars, when we think about table sugar that we usually use, you know, so sucrose is actually one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. And so it's also double sugar. So when we use table sugar, remember, there is 50% of it is fructose. And that's a sugar we don't like. Milk sugar lactose is actually galactose and glucose. So it's a double molecule again. And with lactose, the interesting thing is most of us have a hard time, not most of us, but many people have a hard time digesting milk sugars, just lactose. And you heard about lactose intolerance. And the reason is because it is this double sugar, it doesn't easily get absorbed in a small intestine where it would usually enter the bloodstream. So it has to be broken down into the two single sugars. And the way to do that is that we produce an enzyme called lactase. So you're caught on anything that ends in O's, OSE is a sugar and anything in A's, ASE is usually an enzyme. An enzyme is just some scissors, some biological scissors that snap molecules into. So you have this lactose double sugar that needs to be cut into its individual glucose and galactose sugars in order for them to be absorbed. And if that doesn't happen in the small intestine, it goes undigested to the large intestine. So if we have a lactose intolerance, all that means is we don't make enough of this enzyme lactase. What happens then? It enters the large intestine. That bacteria will digest it. And in the process, these bacteria will produce a lot of gas. It disturbs the balance of the bacteria again, which I talked about earlier is a bad thing. And then people have all these issues. So when you buy lactose-free milk, they don't take the lactose sugar out. They add the lactase enzyme into the milk. And that presplits those molecules. So you already have them pre-digested, right? Now that's still a lot of sugars. So you still have those individual sugar molecules in there. And because now, instead of having these many double sugars, you have them split into single sugars. So the total sugar molecules kind of double because when you split these, so you have more available and it tastes sweeter. That's a long aside. But in general, we're trying to decrease sugars as best we can. And I think all you lose is actually probably an excellent way to do it whenever we need to sweeten something without worrying too much about gaining weight and disturbing the microbiome through all those artificial sweetness, which we really shouldn't not use. Thank you.