Getting Granular: What exactly is sugar?

You may say that you cannot live without sugar but you will be surprised that not everyone knows sugar could be available on their table or in their coffee every morning.

Sugar could be found in almost every plant on earth but commercially, sugar is extracted from sugarcane or sugar beet.

Sugar has managed to become one of the most famous food ingredients today only in the last few hundred years. Countless sugarcane and sugar beet plantations were created all around the world with many European developing countries wanting more and more sugar. 170million metric tons of sugar was created over the last few years, promoting sugarcane to the world's largest crop with over 23.8million hectares of land cultivated.

Sugar is a natural ingredient that has been part of our diet for years. Sugars provide energy for the body. The most common sugar in the body is glucose which your brain, major organs and muscles need to function properly. Some sugars are found naturally in foods(e.g fruits, vegetables and milk) while others are used during processing and working. The body does not distinguish between the different types of sugar and breaks them down in exactly the same way. For example, the sucrose in an apple is broken down in exactly the same way as the sucrose in your cereal bowl.

Types of sugar

By Structure

Monosacharide sugars:

• Glucose (also known as dextrose or grape sugar) can be found in nature in many fruits and plant juices. This type of sugar is created during the process of photosynthesis, during which ingested carbohydrates are converted in glucose. In industry, glucose can be produced from starch by enzymatic hydrolysis.

• Fructose can be found in fruit plants, some vegetable roots, sugar canes and honey. They are the sweetest of the sugars, and because of that they can be found in some of the most-sweetest food products that are produced today. In industry, they are created by adding enzymes into glucose, which transforms part of it into fructose.

• Galactose cannot be found directly in nature in vegetables or fruits, but they are present in metabolism of animals as a component of antigens on the surface of red blood cells. They play an important part in determining blood groups.

Disaccharide sugars:

• Sucrose is most common sugar that is found in sugarcane, roots of beet, and in many other plants (but in the smaller quantities). This sugar type is most common and it can be found in every kitchen in the world.

• Maltose is produced in the germination process of certain grains, such as barley. In its basic structure, maltose is a combination of two molecules of glucose, and is not very sweet.

• Lactose is a sugar that is produced naturally in the milk. It’s formed with the combination of one molecule of galactoseand a molecule of glucose. Some adults loose the enzyme that can break down this type of sugar, and therefore they cannot consume milk-based food products.

By Colour

White sugars:

• Granulated sugar is the most popular sugar of them all. It can be found in any house and market, under the name of common sugar.

• Powdered (icing) sugar is a granulated to have very small particles. It’s most commonly used as a decoration and a final topping on many sweet products.

• Coarse sugar is also used for decorations of many food products. However this type doesn’t have small particles, but larger crystals that can be used in great effects for making sugars that will not change colors during the cooking.

Black sugars:

• Brown sugars retain some of the darker tones from molasses that remains in their structure. Lighter shades of this sugar are used in manufacture of butterscotch, condiments and glazes, but darker shades are used for gingerbread, mincemeat, and baked beans.

• Demerara sugar has large golden crystals. It’s most often used in tea and coffee.

• Free-flowing brown sugars are created in the process of co-crystallization. Because of its lack of moisture, they have structure that resembles that of white sugars.

• Turbinado sugar is a very lightly processed sugar. It’s used mostly in beverages.

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Sugar has various benefits and cautions also to the human body at large.

Sugar for Healthy Living

Healthy living is not always about avoiding sweet stuff but much more about managing to eat foods in diversity not avoiding them.

1. Sugar is Excellent Calories Source
Calories are always associated with weight gain and obesity. That’s why a lot of people are spending most of their times counting calories they consume. However, calories are the reasons why you have energy to do some activities, that’s why whenever you consume calories is better to find a way to burn it.

2. Sugar for Insulin Benefits
Insulin is essential to the production of energy. Without which, glucose will remain in your bloodstream and cause the spike of blood sugar. Insulin will turn glucose into energy that you could use to do all the activities all day.

3. Sugar is Excellent Energy Source
If you need immediate energy booster, sugar is the excellent source. That’s why, when you add sugar to your coffee in the morning, the combination of caffeine and sugar will give you the energy booster you really need. However, you need to careful because too much sugar will give you too much energy but only for a while, so you should spend the rest of the day being sluggish and unfocused.

4. Sugar to Store Energy

Sugar has prominent role in human body metabolism because glucose found in sugar if it is not used or turned into energy will be stocked in your body cells as glycogen. This compound is excellent source of energy wherever you need it. However, too much stored glycogen in your body cells will be turned into fat that will lead to conditions like weight gain and obesity.

5. Sugar is Solution to Instant Mood Booster
Whenever you feel sad or moody, try to eat candy or add more sugar to your herbal tea. It is because sugar contains some compound that will send certain signal to your brain to produce more dopamine, a hormone that is responsible to euphoric feeling. It will improve your mood and make you a little happier.

Sugar for Healthy Skin

Well, you must be surprised if you make a list of how beneficial sugar for the health of your skin is. The list below may tell you some but actually there are more.

6. Sugar Contains Glycolic Acid
If you are not familiar with glycolic acid; it is type of acid compound that responsible to protect your skin from sun-damaged and premature aging and sugar is the natural source of this glycolic acid. However, since covering your skin with sugar is not the solution to protect it from bad effects of UV rays, using sunscreen is still highly recommended while sugar is only used for regular treatment.

7. Sugar for Natural Skin Scrub
How much money you should spend to go to spa or purchasing expensive skin scrub products? Well, you could save more money if you know how to make homemade and natural skin scrub made from sugar. Sugar contains AHA or Alpha Hydroxy Acid which is an excellent exfoliant. It will exfoliate the top layer of your skin to eliminate the dead skin cells and reveal the natural skin glowing.

8. Sugar for Kissable Lips
Well, just like sugar is effective to remove dead skin cells in your body, sugar is also excellent to remove dead skin cells in your lips. Just by applying the mixture of sugar and honey to your lips every day, you could kiss goodbye peeling and chapped lips for good. Instead, you will get smooth and kissable lips.

9. Sugar to Eliminate Blackheads
Not only for your body skin and lips, you could also apply sugar as face scrubs. However, since skin face is more sensitive than body skin, you should mix it with some ingredients that give more benefits to your skin face like sesame oil. Applying them to your skin face and then rub it slowly in circle to help removing the blackheads and then wash them off with warm and then cold water to close the open pores after the scrubbing.

10. Sugar to Lighten the Toned Skin Areas
It is very annoying when your skin products cannot deal with some toned skin areas like in your armpits, elbows and knees. However, you don’t need to worry anymore because the same natural skin scrubs you have made for your body could be applied to those tone areas as well for smoother and healthier skin.

Cautions of Sugar

If you make the list of bad effects of sugar, the list is probably much longer than the benefits of sugar for health but still, you cannot just judge sugar to be the bad guy that cause harms to your body. Sugar will do its job excellently if you only consume it in moderate amount. If you cannot control your appetite toward sweet stuffs and got all the bad effects of sugar, it is not sugar’s fault but yours. The list below only occurs when you consume sugar without consideration.

• Too much sugar in your body could cause weight gain that could lead to obesity. However, consuming too much sugar for those with underweight issue is not recommended because though it may help them gaining weight but more harmful effects may likely to occur as well.

• Sugar is giving benefits to insulin but too much sugar will cause the spike of blood sugar that will lead to diabetes.

• Sugar is never friendly for heart especially in high dosage. Not only that, sugar also responsible to the increase of cholesterol level.

• The excess insulin in your blood stream could be harmful for your blood vessels too that will lead to high blood pressure. Uncontrolled blood pressure could be really fatal because it will lead to conditions like stroke or heart attack.

• The most dangerous thing that sugar could do to your body is when it starts to give you addiction, so be careful with the amount of sugar you consume.

• Too much sugar in your body could turn you into someone else because it could be an excellent energy booster but if it is too much, you will feel energized for no reason and hyperactive in a very bad way.

So, sugar is probably making your coffee sweet, your mood better and your skin smoother but too much of it will give you nothing but harmful and scary effects.
Furthermore, if you really want to avoid sugar, you could avoid all kinds of refined sugar and instead consume the raw or natural sugar only for all the benefits of sugar for health. For sweetener alternative, don’t fall to some commercials that say corn-sugar is better than sugar, well corn-sugar is much worse than the actual sugar.
Honey and natural fruit juice are still the best sweetener alternative in this matter.

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Authored by @Datibomchic

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