MentalPolyphonics
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
A lot of people I talk to don’t seem to understand sugar very well, so I’d like to take this opportunity to educate my readers. I’m going to simplify things because I don’t fully understand the biology and I don’t think you need to either. 
The two most common simple sugars (monosaccharides) are glucose and fructose. Glucose is what cells input for energy. Fructose is metabolized in the liver into either glucose or fatty tissue. Transport of fructose to the liver appears to be sped up by the presence of some glucose. So it’s best to eat fructose without glucose.
The liver prioritizes metabolism into glucose, but it makes the decision based on the glucose level in the liver itself. The issue is that when a large amount of fructose is digested, the liver bottlenecks and produces fatty tissue. The liver also prioritizes metabolism of fructose over other activities. So it’s better to eat glucose than fructose. (Excess glucose is also metabolized into fatty tissue by the liver, but without the bottleneck much less dietary glucose should end up as fat.)
Simple sugars combine (polymerize) into complex sugars (polysaccharides). The most common one is sucrose = 1 glucose + 1 fructose. Sucrose is broken down into glucose and fructose in the stomach, which takes time; there’s some evidence that this digestion is regulated by blood sugar levels. So it’s better to eat sucrose than glucose and fructose unpolymerized.
Glucose is 75% as sweet and fructose is 175% as sweet as sucrose. So if you’re cooking with fructose, you don’t need to use as much.
I’ve written the above conclusions from the point of view of someone who doesn’t want to get fat. If you’ve just expended significant energy through exercise, you want to get glucose to your muscles (including your heart) as fast as possible so they can start repairing themselves. Some athletes like to chug maltodextrin = glucose + glucose + glucose + …, which has the emergent property of being not sweet at all.
MentalPolyphonics » Honey and Apples are Poison
on April 16, 2010 at 9:37 am
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