Sugar

Sugar is a sweet-tasting type of carbohydrate that we add to food. Simple sugars, called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Bigger sugars, named disaccharides, are made when two simple sugars join together. Common ones are sucrose, the kind in table sugar, lactose from milk, and maltose from grains.

White sugar is almost all sucrose. We get it from plants like sugarcane and sugar beet. People use sugar to make foods and drinks taste sweeter, like in cookies, cakes, coffee, and tea. Eating too much sugar can cause health problems, such as obesity or diabetes. The World Health Organization says it’s best to keep sugar to less than 10% of our daily food energy.

Etymology

The word "sugar" has an interesting history. It started in Sanskrit with the word śarkarā, meaning "ground or candied sugar." The idea moved to Persian as shakar and then to Arabic as sukkar. From Arabic, it entered Medieval Latin as succarum, and later became sucre in Old French before reaching its current English form, sugar. Sugar was brought to Europe by Arabs in places like Sicily and Spain.

Another type of sugar called jaggery, which is a coarse brown sugar made from date palm sap or sugarcane juice, also has roots in similar languages. The Portuguese word jágara comes from the Malayalam cakkarā, which itself traces back to the Sanskrit śarkarā.

History

Main article: History of sugar

Sugar was first made from sugar cane in ancient India. People in China wrote about sugar cane as early as the 8th century BCE. Later, writers from Greece and Rome also wrote about sugar. By the 1400s, sugar was being grown in places like Madeira and the Canary Islands. When Christopher Columbus reached the New World, he brought sugar there. Soon, sugar farms grew up in Cuba and Jamaica. In the 1800s, people in Germany found a way to get sugar from beets.

Over time, sugar became a regular part of daily life. As people wanted more sugar, it changed economies and societies around the world. Today, we use much more sugar than we did in the past.

Chemistry

Sugar is a sweet substance found in many foods. It has a special formula and can be grouped by its size. The smallest sugars are called simple sugars. They include glucose, fructose, and galactose. These are the basic building blocks of sugars.

Larger sugars are called compound sugars. They are made when two simple sugars join together. Common examples are sucrose (found in table sugar), lactose (found in milk), and maltose (found in malt). These are just a few types of sugars we find every day.