What exactly is sugar?
Sugar can be defined in two ways. First, “sugar” is a general term used to describe a range of different carbohydrates. Depending upon the number of constituent parts, these can be divided into:
- Monosaccharides or simple sugars, e.g. glucose (grape sugar) and fructose (fruit sugar)
- Disaccharides, e.g. maltose (malt sugar), lactose (milk sugar) and sucrose (table sugar)
- Polysaccharides, e.g. starch and cellulose
“Sugar” is also a term commonly used to denote table sugar. Monosaccharides and disaccharides have a sweet taste, while polysaccharides do not. The following focuses on the “sweet sugars”.
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