The Rise of the Raw Food Dessert

I love a dessert as much as anyone.  Give me anything with pastry and any combination of dark chocolate, salted caramel and crème patissiere and I am done for!  I will devour it – no questions asked.  But here’s the rub I only do that ever so occasionally.  It’s a treat.

If I have a hankering for something sweet then it’s sated by usually a piece of fruit, a couple of tablespoons natural yoghurt with a light drizzle of maple syrup or honey, or a couple of small pieces of good quality dark chocolate (about 20g)…and that’s not every night.

Over the last few years we have seen the rise of the raw dessert.  They are delicious and what makes them even better they are made from beautiful unprocessed ingredients including: mejool dates, other dried fruit, raw honey, maple syrup, raw cashews and other nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables, coconut oil, cacao butter.  Oh so yummy!

The trouble is that because they’re raw and contain highly nutritious ingredients and because they don’t have refined sweeteners in them we tend to think of them as the ‘healthy’ alternative.  The truth is that they can be (and mostly are) very energy dense meaning that they have a very high kilojoule count.   Whilst I don’t prescribe to the simplified concept that a kilojoule is a kilojoule (you can get vastly different nutrient profiles from foods with the same energy content) I still believe we need to be careful not to over-consume.

Another thing that is important to remember is that at the end of the day choosing to eat honey, agave syrup, maple syrup or rice malt syrup is not so different to eating sugar.  In a nutshell our bodies convert these other sweeteners to glucose just as it does with table sugar.  Sweeteners generally provide high energy for very little nutritional value.

Eating these raw dessert can also crowd out room in your daily diet for energy-low nutrient-dense foods like fresh fruits and vegetables.

So if weight loss or weight management is part of your journey then limit your consumption of raw food desserts as you would any other dessert.  If you are consuming more energy than you use then the very real likelihood is that you will gain weight.

Remember all desserts are treat foods – raw or not.  So enjoy a treat every now and then as part of a great well-balanced holistic food plan.