The power of oses

Today I’d like to write about oses. What, you might wonder, are oses? Well, that’s actually a nickname I’ve come up with for the wide variety of sugars that are found in the foods that we eat. Since the proper name for all sugars ends in –ose (I’ll give you a few examples in a minute), I like to call them all “oses.” (It saves me some effort.)

When I say sugar, you might think of granulated sugar, that gritty white stuff we use to sweeten things when we cook. But that is only one specific kind of sugar – specifically, it is sucrose. (See, it ends in –ose.) There are actually dozens of varieties of sugars in the world. What, chemically speaking, is a sugar?

Sugar is a carbohydrate. Carbohydrates come in 2 basic varieties, actually, sugars and starches. Starches are the biggest source of carbohydrates that we eat, but sugars are themselves very important sources of carbohydrates, as well. There are 4 major kinds of sugar that we come into contact with regularly – 3 come from plants and 1 from animals. The 3 plant sugars are called sucrose (what we know of as baking sugar), fructose and glucose.

Fructose is the sweetest of all natural sugars. Its chemical structure is very simple – 6 carbons, 6 oxygens, and 12 hydrogens. It is found in a variety of plant sources, including tree fruits, berries, melons and root vegetables. Chemically speaking, it is actually very similar to glucose; they both have the same numbers and types of atoms, those atoms are simply connected differently in the 2 different sugars. Glucose is the least sweet of the three major plant sugars, but it is the primary source of energy for living cells of all kinds (plants and animals). Sucrose is also commonly known as saccharose, and it is known as a disaccharide. That means it is made up of 2 pieces of glucose and fructose that are bonded together in a specific way. It is the plant sugar that is intermediate in its sweetness between its 2 cousins.

Various food items that we think of as sweet usually actually contain a mixture of the three plant sugars. For example, honey is a mixture of glucose, fructose and sucrose (80% sugars, 20% water). Maple sugar (which makes up maple syrup) is mostly sucrose. Molasses is a byproduct of sugarcane or beet sugar, which is also primarily sucrose. High fructose corn syrup is actually only about 45-55% fructose, the rest of the sugar being a mixture of sucrose and glucose.

The 1 major animal sugar is called lactose. Lactose is found in the milk of all mammals, though it is not as sweet as the plant sugars That means that, though milk has a relatively high sugar content, it doesn’t taste as sweet as something sweetened with sucrose, fructose or glucose. Of course, the rest of a mammal’s body (blood and muscles) also contains sugar in the form of glucose. After all, it is the major energy supply for metabolism. However, mammals do not synthesize glucose out of the constituent atoms – they produce it by converting any other kind of sugar they eat into it.

I know that sugar gets a bad reputation, some of it deserved. After all, our diets are higher in sugar (eg higher in sucrose) than is probably good for us. And a little sugar goes a long way, so we don’t really need to eat as much as we do. But sugar does have a very important place in our metabolism, as well as in making food palatable (actually, making it quite yummy sometimes). So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, equating sugar with all things bad and horrible. Like everything, just take in moderation.