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
Non-nutritive sweeteners work by mimicking the shape of sugar, but being chemically different enough that they can’t be absorbed. So your taste buds are fooled, but the receptors that absorb sugar are not. Many of them (the ones that end in -ol, like xylitol) have an extra -OH group added, which stops them getting absorbed.
The difference between (for example) eating an apple or orange, and eating the exact amount of sugar in them is that you’re missing out on lots of other useful dietary substances. Even just the water, but also fibre and vitamins.
Imagine how full you’d be after eating a big bowl of oranges, vs a big bowl of Kit Kats. But the oranges have (per google) 9 grams of sugar per 100 g, and the Kit Kats have 49 g of sugar per 100 g. So when you eat an orange, 91% of it isn’t sugar (and one orange has your daily minimum of vitamin C). And when you eat a Kit Kat, almost half of it is just sugar.
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