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They're... cookies. A treat.

Looking at the nutritional profile of cookies doesn't make sense. You're supposed to eat them in such low quantity/frequency that it doesn't matter.

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Yes, cookies are not the most healthy thing, but there are better and worse ones. It is not just even about it containing some sugar. Why replace the spices that made a traditional cookie special, with more sugar? What is distinctive about sugar?

There is a good reason for that. Even traditional speculaas (not Lotus or other mass produced speculoos/biscoff) contains less and less speculaas spices the further you move away from Amsterdam. Because the spices arrived there, they were cheapest there. The further away (in this case south) you moved, the more expensive they were. This leads to bakers, especially commercial ones, to use less in their recipes.

Biscoff is a highly spiced cookie that's less sweet than most American cookies.

And sugar is special because it's essentially a drug that our brains are programmed to seek out and eat more of.

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