What are sugars?

Let's look at that stuff we usually mean when we speak about sugar.  You know, that stuff we have on the table, pour out on breakfast cereal, that we dump up in coffee and tea and  which is found in cakes and cookies and many of the soft drinks we like so well.  Scientists call it sucrose.  It is a combination of two smaller sugars known as glucose and fructose.  Sucrose is one of the two sugars commonly found in our food. 

The second common sugar is found in milk.  This is lactose or "milk sugar".  Lactose is a combination of glucose and another small sugar, called galactose. 

There is a third common sugar too, known as maltose which actually is not found in the food we eat.  Maltose  is made of two glucose molecules.  We make it ourselves from starch when we eat bread, potatoes and other starch-containing foods. 

Starch is a log chain of glucose molecules.  It is broken down in the intestines to maltose, a disaccharide or "double sugar" made up of two molecules of glucose.   

Once again.  The sugar we usually eat is sucrose.  Those who drink fresh milk get lactose too.  These are "double sugars", that is, they are made up of two smaller sugars linked together by a chemical bond.  In addition we consume lesser amounts of two small sugars;  glucose and fructose.  These are found in fruit, the exact amounts being dependent upon how ripe the fruits are.  For example, an apple contains around six grams of fructose and something like three grams of glucose.  Honey is a rich source of fructose, being made up of about 40 % fructose and 50% glucose.   During the past decade a combination of glucose and fructose, called HFCS or "high fructose corn syrup" has been used to replace some of the sucrose in soft drinks.  This is an approximately 50/50 mixture of these two small sugars.

We can summarize all of this in a table:

* Monosaccharides, ** Disaccharides, *** Polysaccharides.

The  three small sugars (single sugars or monosaccharides) have the same basic components (six carbon atoms, twelve hydrogen atoms and six oxygen atoms).  The differences between them lie in the ways these are assembled.  Those "little" differences determine how your body handles these sugars. We will just use simple icons for these here in Sugars-4-Kids, but if you want to see the exact structures you can click here.   The differing structures of these sugars also influence their taste.  We are used to sucrose and experience its taste as "normally sweet".  Glucose is experienced as less sweet than sucrose while fructose is "very sweet". 

The "double" sugars or disaccharides are made by combining two "single" sugars with a strong and stable chemical bond.  All of the digestible disaccharides have one glucose element bound to another of the "single" sugars. 

Our usual table sugar looks like this:

It's made of a glucose and a fructose chained together with a "sort of chain" or a chemical bond.  This has to be split is we are going to use it as food.  More about that in the next section.

So these are our sugars:

Sucrose = glucose + fructose.

 Lactose = glucose + galactose.

Maltose = glucose + glucose.

In addition we have polysaccharides or complex sugars.  These are long chains of glucose bound together chemically.  Some of these are digestible (starch) while others are not (cellulose as in wood!).  Once again:  in spite of the huge differences in character between these materials, they all are built up from the same basic element, GLUCOSE.  More about this further on.