Eli5: Whats the difference between “processed sugar” and sugar found in fruit, bread and milk etc? arent processed sugar the same sugar molecules as those?

Question

And more specifically, what is it that makes processed sugar worse than consuming sugar from those products, is it blood sugar spike or something?

In: 311

Answer 1

Most regular foods have other stuff with the sugar. A piece of fruit has fibre. Milk has fat and protein.

And apart from just the content of the food, some foods have some slightly time-consuming process to eat them (like peeling a mandarin, or even just chewing sugar cane).

Things with ‘added’ sugar tend to have just a lot of sugar compared to the other parts, and be convenient to eat quickly. Think of a sweet drink you could easily drink quickly, or a cookie that you can scarf down several of them without needing to peel or chop or even chew very much (because they have a very convenient texture).

So there isn’t really much chemical difference – the ‘added’ sugar came from something you could have eaten directly, but the practical difference tends to be that you get more sugar from these foods, and you tend to eat more of them, so you can easily get a lot of sugar.

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e.g.

A large orange might have 14 grams of sugar. If I want a big snack, if I have 3 oranges I’ll feel like I can’t really have any more oranges, and I’ve spent a bucnh of time eating them.

So I typically just eat 2 oranges as a snack, and that’s 28 grams of sugar from that fruit snack, and I don’t feel like eating for a while.

If I eat chocolate, that is about 50% sugar, so ~50-60 grams of chocolate and I have the same amount of sugar.

And let me tell you, I can confortably eat *waaay* more than 50 grams of chocolate!