Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've spent WAAAY too much time trying to perfect my sugar-free shaved ice/snow cone syrup recipe. I mean, I *like* shaved ice, but I'd only get it once or twice a year. Then, for some reason, I got on a kick this summer, and purchased a legit ice shaver, but then ran into the problem of consuming too much sugar. When I tried to find sugar-free syrups, there weren't that many, and those I found either didn't taste good, or caused major gas (sorry if that's TMI...) So I set out to create my own. Shouldn't be hard, right? Well I found out pretty quickly that anything combined with erythritol was a no-no for my digestive system, which ruled out about 90% of the sweeteners on the market. I found that Stevia worked well, but then it brought up a new issue: the syrup wasn't "syrupy" and would freeze when poured onto the shaved ice, making it sort of like eating "dry snow." In other words, it wasn't slushy. I tried xantham gum, guar gum, sodium alginate, cellulose gum, salt, and many other additives to try to get it to behave like regular sugar water, with no luck. Then, I realized that one of my favorite "healthy" sweets, SmartSweets, was sweetened with allulose. And that doesn't cause issues for me, stomach-wise. Because it's chemically similar to normal sugar, and had some volume to it (being 70% as sweet as normal sugar), I thought that might have enough bulk to make it slushy rather than icy. However, I didn't want to add 1.5 cups of allulose into 1 cup of water. That seemed excessive. So my next thought was, "monkfruit is the cool new kid on the block as well, and it's way sweeter than sugar. I wonder if someone has combined allulose with monkfruit?" Sure enough, Besti came to the rescue. I used a Snowie flavor packet, 1 cup of this Besti sweetener, and 16 ounces of water, and BAM! Perfect consistency and *remarkably* close-to-sugar taste. I'm now in zero-calorie shaved ice heaven. This stuff is the real deal.