Title says it all
In: Biology
Well, technically sugar is a carb.
But what you mean is mostly starch. Starch is a chain of sugar molecules, your body breaks it down into sugar to gain energy.
This takes some energy and some time, so it’s better for you than sugar (no insulin spike). But carbs aren’t all the same, long chained ones take more effort to break down than short chained ones (wich is why white bread has such a bad reputation)
Carbs are broken down into 2 groups. Simple and complex carbs. When those are broken down the result is what you are referring to which is glucose. There are different forms of sugar. Each type is considered a carbohydrate. So essentially bread would be a chain of simple carbs that need to be broken down into glucose so that the body can use it as fuel. Now you want to really see something interesting? Look up gluconeogenesis. Thats when the body takes the excess protein and fat from food and turns it into glucose.
From the perspective of cooking- sugar is a carbohydrate, carbohydrate isn’t sugar. Much like protein isn’t amino acids, and fats aren’t triglycerides.
All carbohydrates are made of joined up strings of glucose (which is blood sugar), fructose, and galactose. At the end of the day, they all get used to make energy. These are called monosaccharides.
If we just included all carbohydrate as ‘monosaccharides’ though, it would hide certain pieces of information. Different carbohydrates have different health effects. Complex carbohydrates are pretty good for you. Humans can’t digest all carbohydrates – fibre is carbs too and it’s fantastic for your health! It would also hide added sugars, which are usually pretty bad for you.
If we presented it as “sugar”, then a banana (22g carbs/100g) would appear to be way less good for you than a can of Coca-Cola (10g/100g).
From an ELI5 standpoint, it is the other way around.
Carbohydrates are the larger class. What we call sugars are simple carbs whereas starches are complex carbohydrates. Basically our body has means to break down starches into sugars – it actually starts with the saliva that we produce.
Starch is basically long chains of sugar. The longer the chains the harder to break down. Bacteria produces enzymes that break down these chains into their sugar parts. Carbs is just anything that contains sugar, so sugar or starch doesn’t matter.
The good thing about starch compared to sugar is that you slowly get the energy instead of all at once.
Your question is more a matter of language than chemistry:
_All_ carbohydrates _are_ sugars: sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, galactose, dextrose — you name em. They all belong in the saccharine category, and saccharine come from the Greek word for sugar: zachari.
However, when people talk about _sugar_, they almost exclusively refer to table sugar, which is a mix of fructose and glucose.
So to answer your two questions: bread doesn’t turn into sugar, it _is_ sugar — just not the same sugar as what you put into your coffee; and carbs _are_ sugars, but people simply refer to a particular few of them when they say that word.
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