The second problem with sugar alcohols (in addition to yesterday’s fact that sugar alcohol sweetened foods often aren’t lower in calories), is the roaring, projectile diarrhea that sugar alcohols can cause. Malitol, xylitol, sorbitol or erithritol are used to sweeten most of the aritificial crab and artificial lobster on the market. Eating any significant quantity of this stuff can send you on a beeline to the bathroom for hours. On my Cat Food Diet, for example, patients would eat 8 ounces of aritifical crab or aritificial lobster, twice a day. Weight loss would be spectacular, but unless chronic constipation was a problem, most patients could not stay on this version of Cat Food for more than a day or two, because of they lived spent their day on the toilet. The same diarrhea can happen eating candy and cookies and ice cream sweetened with sugar alcohols. So be careful.