If all carbohydrates get broken down to their most simple form, sugar, why is it unhealthy to just eat tablespoons of sugar?
In: Biology
A few reasons:
1.) The amount of carbohydrates you get per-pound from more complex foods is much less than the amount from processed table sugar, and it also takes more time to digest. So, it’s more difficult to overeat. A pound of table sugar will be stored mostly as fat, while a pound of chicken will need to be broken down and digested first. Whatever sugars are extracted will mostly be used, and only a minimal amount will be stored.
2.) Table sugar has virtually no other nutrients or minerals, so you won’t be getting any of those either.
3.) It can be killer for your teeth, since bacteria *love* sugar.
Sugar itself isn’t bad – in fact you need it. *Added* sugars are bad, because too much will cause your body to store it. This can lead to weight gain, heart disease, and a whole slew of other problems primarily caused by overeating.
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If you were to only eat tablespoons of sugar, you’d suffer from malnutrition and get various disease.
Nutrition isn’t only a matter of energy, there are various nutrients that your body needs but cannot synthesize on its own.
Those are, broadly, vitamins, fatty acids, amino acids, minerals, and water.
What does it mean “unhealthy” exactly? It’s a very vague term. A tablespoon of sugar is just too much sugar to be used immediately by the average human, so most of it becomes stored as fat. If that is what you consider unhealthy, then yes, it’s unhealthy. But if you need the carbohydrates, because you are doing heavy work, then a tablespoon of sugar is “fine”.
Most of the dangers come from the glycemic response to these various foods.
Pure sugar with nothing to slow the absorption rate will spike your blood sugar. This causes your pancreas to release Insulin to counteract that spike, which in turn reduces your blood sugar below normal levels, so your body releases glucose into the blood stream to compensate, which spikes it again, causing your pancreas to release more insulin… Lather, rinse, repeat until your glucose levels have hit a steady baseline.
This yo-yo effect taxes your pancreas significantly, as well as has other downstream effects on your body.
The more effort it takes your body to absorb the sugars, the healthier it is for your system when consumed in moderation.
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The way your liver processes it. Eating an apple has a good amount of sugar (mostly as fructose), but it also has fiber, which slows the release of insulin and extends digestion.
Eating raw sugar, your body would react as it would to another toxin, in a rather extreme fashion. Your pancreas would excrete insulin at an alarming rate to cope with it.
Refined sugar has issues as other processed things, like table salt. In nature, sugar comes packaged in optimal form (as fructose with fiber, usually). Just as sea salt comes with other minerals like magnesium and potassium, which complement it. Stripping it from those other naturally occurring substances makes it better for profit margins, but worse for your body.
There is really no difference between sugar and simple starches like white flour, white rice, and white potatoes. The saliva in your mouth breaks down starches so that they are essentially sugar when they hit your stomach.
More complex carbs, especially fiber, take a lot longer to break down, so their glycemic impact is drawn out and leads to fewer blood sugar spikes that strains your pancreas.
“Sugar” is a slightly problematic term, because it is a term for a class of compounds.
Table sugar, which is normally what we have around, is sucrose, which is made up of two simple sugars stuck together. Your body has no issue splitting them up, so each molecule of sucrose becomes 1 glucose and 1 fructose.
Most sweet foods contain either sucrose directly, or “high fructose corn syrup” which, is a mixture of fructose and glucose all mixed together.
Carbs are mostly just long chains of glucose, and enzymes happily cleave off glucose from the chains and use it. So carbs become sugar, but mostly, become glucose. This is energy for the whole body, every cell.
The difference comes with fructose…. remember the sucrose is a source of it…. When your liver processes sugars, it makes fats and cholesterol. This is “de novo lipogenysis” which is just the fancy latin way of saying “the creation of new fat”.
The thing is, remember how I said glucose is food for your whole body? Because of that, only a small percentage <10% ever gets processed by the liver.
Fructose however is not an energy source for every cell. Fructose is processed in the liver, and 90% of it goes there. [Fructolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructolysis) is the process:
> Unlike glucose, which is directly metabolized widely in the body, fructose is almost entirely metabolized in the liver in humans, where it is directed toward replenishment of liver glycogen and triglyceride synthesis.[1] Under one percent of ingested fructose is directly converted to plasma triglyceride.[2] 29% – 54% of fructose is converted in liver to glucose, and about a quarter of fructose is converted to lactate. 15% – 18% is converted to glycogen.[3] Glucose and lactate are then used normally as energy to fuel cells all over the body.[2]
There are different types of sugar and your body processes them differently.
[https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/sucrose-glucose-fructose](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/sucrose-glucose-fructose)
*The Obesity Code* is a really interesting book that goes into a lot of why it matters.
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