Anecdotal and will get downvoted, but I have WAY more energy when I eat sugar. And yes, I have cut sugar for up to a month at a time before. I never got the magical increases in energy people talk about.
I run circles around the meat eaters in my life. My latest change was replacing maple syrup with date sugar. I also started drinking matcha often. The change to a Whole Foods sugar made all the difference in the stability of my energy levels. Matcha also makes the caffeine buzz a lot more steady, manageable, and even calm. Changing out processed foods for Whole Foods might outweigh the carb/fat/protein differences. There’s still a lot to biology and nutrition we don’t know, in my first hand experience.
I really don’t see how a Whole Foods sugar has any different effect compared “normal” sugar...
This site claims that different sugars have different glycemic indexes. E.g palm sugar (from date trees) at 35 and brown sugar at 65. https://www.eatthis.com/sweeteners/
The way my doctor put it: science likes to think “a molecule is a molecule” and it’s possible to isolate out the benefits of a food in individual extracts. But that’s been shown to fall short of reality over time. Nutrition is still a largely misunderstood system. Sticking with Whole Foods (bad autocorrect) should be more predictable/reproducible.