Sugar is in fruit and you can eat a ton of fruit and be ok, but then you can’t eat much candy or pop. What’s the difference? Also sugar vs sweeteners? Sugar is such a world I can’t wrap my mind around because there’s so much debate!
In: Biology
The difference between the sugar in fruit and the sugar in candy or pop is how it’s packaged. The sugar in fruit is mostly contained in the cells of the fruit, and this means two things. One, not all of the sugar is available for your body to absorb, because chewing doesn’t break open every cell, and our digestive system can’t break down intact plant cells. Two, when you eat fruit, you’re eating a bunch of other stuff with it, namely the soluble fibre that slows down your body’s absorption of the sugar.
Candy, on the other hand, is refined sugar, that is, sugar that’s been stripped of its natural plant packaging. This means that all of the sugar in candy is readily available, and there’s nothing else with it to slow down the absorption, so you get a massive spike in blood sugar (which is generally bad).
Artificial sweeteners are something else entirely. In pretty much every case, the shape of the sweetener molecule is similar enough to that of sugar that it can fit into the bits of your tongue that taste sweetness, tricking your body into thinking there’s sugar there. For “natural” sweeteners like xylitol and other sugar alcohols, your body can still break them down for energy, but for artificial sweeteners like aspartame, your body can’t break them down, so you get the sweet taste without calories (which is a whole separate issue).
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