I asked recently in my Facebook group whether anyone wanted to know more about sugar...the answer was overwhelmingly 'yes', so here I am to tell you everything you need to know!
So first up, all carbohydrates that you eat have to be broken down and rearranged by the body into GLUCOSE. Glucose is one of the monosaccharides or simple sugars. The other two are FRUCTOSE and GALACTOSE.
All the carbohydrates and sugars are made up of some combination of these three molecules.
GLUCOSE is the only thing your body can use to create energy.
Let's take the example of lactose, the sugar in dairy. Lactose is made up of one molecule of glucose, and one molecule of galactose. To absorb this sugar and use or store it, your body has to break it down into glucose (which it can use immediately) and galactose (which it must then rearrange into glucose before it can use it).
Your body can do this because all the simple sugars are some combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms, in different arrangements.
Fructose is a bit different - in order to be absorbed, it goes first to the liver, where it is either stored, turned into glucose or turned into fat. This is why excessive fructose is bad for you - it damages the liver by causing fat to be stored in the liver, and it can lead to several other conditions.
However, fructose can be a better choice for people with diabetes, because absorbing it doesn't immediately raise blood sugar, so it doesn't require insulin.
But whether you have diabetes or not, fructose is not something you want a lot of in your diet.
However, the fructose in fruit is generally considered to be better than added fructose, because of the fibre and other nutrients in the fruit. I still don't recommend people consume more than the recommended amount of fruit each day though (2 serves).
As a side note, many people with IBS find that fructose-containing foods worsen their IBS symptoms.
Ingredient and Nutrition Labelling
On food labels, you'll see a line for 'carbohydrates' and a line for 'sugars'.
CARBOHYDRATES refers to total carbs - starches and sugars. Starch is a large molecule of glucose. It's how plants store their glucose, and we absorb it as glucose when we eat it.
SUGARS refers to total carbs minus starches. Sugars can be any other form of glucose, fructose and galactose.
FIBRE is then listed separately (this is optional in Australia, food companies don’t have to list fibre at all unless they’re making a claim about the fibre content). Fibre is also just glucose, but because of the way the molecules are bonded, our bodies can’t absorb it.
A lot of claims get made about ‘natural’ sugars, ‘healthy’ sugars and things being ‘sugar-free’.
So let’s evaluate this. First of all, all sugars are natural. Rice malt syrup is no more natural than caster sugar. They’re both from a plant. Is one healthier than the other? Let’s see.
What we typically think of as ‘sugar’; white sugar, raw sugar, icing sugar - these are all sucrose, which is one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. But many of the sugar alternatives are also just one form of sugar or another, for example:
Maple syrup is sucrose
Honey has fructose and glucose, but more fructose
Rice malt syrup is glucose
Coconut sugar is sucrose
So you can see that these ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’ sugars contain the same sugars as regular table sugar.
But, some of these sugars may have other health benefits that regular sugar doesn’t have. Some of them may be lower GI, or they may have other nutrients like vitamins and minerals. Coconut sugar even contains a little fibre.
However, none of these health benefits outweighs the fact that they’re still sugar, and anyone claiming that a recipe with rice malt syrup is ‘sugar-free’ is wrong.
It could be argued that the lack of fructose makes some of these alternatives healthier, but excess glucose in your diet can lead to many negative health effects also.
If you come across a sugar alternative I haven’t mentioned here, you can usually Google them to find out their sugar profile.
My key takeaway:
Many of the sugar alternatives contain the same simple sugars as regular table sugar, so they’re not any healthier than regular sugar.
All sugars should be eaten in moderation.