Sugar
Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double sugars, are molecules made of two bonded monosaccharides; common examples are sucrose, lactose, and maltose. White sugar is almost pure sucrose. During digestion, compound sugars are hydrolysed into simple sugars.
Longer chains of saccharides are not regarded as sugars, and are called oligosaccharides or polysaccharides. Starch is a glucose polymer found in plants - the most abundant source of energy in human food. Some other chemical substances, such as ethylene glycol, glycerol and sugar alcohols, may have a sweet taste, but are not classified as sugar.
Sugars are found in the tissues of most plants. Honey and fruits are abundant natural sources of simple sugars. Sucrose is especially concentrated in sugarcane and sugar beet, making them efficient for commercial extraction to make refined sugar. In 2016, the combined world production of those two crops was about two billion tonnes. Maltose may be produced by malting grain. Lactose is the only sugar that cannot be extracted from plants, as it occurs only in milk, including human breast milk, and in some dairy products. A cheap source of sugar is corn syrup, industrially produced by converting corn starch into sugars, such as maltose, fructose and glucose.
Sucrose is used in prepared foods, is sometimes added to commercially available ultra-processed food and beverages, and is sometimes used as a sweetener for foods and beverages. Globally on average a person consumes about of sugar each year. North and South Americans consume up to, and Africans consume under.
The use of added sugar in food and beverage manufacturing is a concern for elevated calorie intake, which is associated with an increased risk of several diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disorders. In 2015, the World Health Organization recommended that adults and children reduce their intake of free sugars to less than 10% of their total energy intake, encouraging a reduction to below 5%.
Etymology
The etymology of sugar reflects the commodity's spread. From Sanskrit śarkarā, meaning "ground or candied sugar", came Persian shakar and Arabic sukkar. The Arabic word was borrowed in Medieval Latin as succarum, whence came the 12th century French sucre and the English sugar. Sugar was introduced into Europe by the Arabs in Sicily and Spain.The English word jaggery, a coarse brown sugar made from date palm sap or sugarcane juice, has a similar etymological origin: Portuguese jágara from the Malayalam cakkarā, which is from the Sanskrit śarkarā.
History
Sugar was first produced from sugar cane in the Indian subcontinent. Diverse species of sugar cane seem to have originated from India and New Guinea. Sugarcane is described in Chinese manuscripts dating to the 8th century BCE, which state that the use of sugarcane originated in India.Nearchus, admiral of Alexander the Great, the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides and the Roman Pliny the Elder also described sugar. In the mid-15th century, sugar was introduced into Madeira and the Canary Islands, where it was mass produced. Christopher Columbus introduced it to the New World leading to sugar industries in Cuba and Jamaica by the 1520s. The Portuguese took sugar cane to Brazil.
Beet sugar, the starting point for the modern sugar industry, was a German invention. Beet sugar was first produced industrially in 1801 in Cunern, Prussia.
Sugar became a household item by the 19th century, and this evolution of taste and demand for sugar as an essential food ingredient resulted in major economic and social changes. Demand drove, in part, the colonisation and industrialisation of previously under-developed lands. It was also intimately associated with slavery. World consumption increased more than 100 times from 1850 to 2000, led by the United Kingdom, where it increased from about 2 pounds per head per year in 1650 to 90 pounds by the early 20th century.
Chemistry
Scientifically, sugar loosely refers to a number of compounds typically with the formula n. Some large classes of sugars, ranked in increasing order of molecular weight are monosaccharides, disaccharides, or oligosaccharides.Monosaccharides
Monosaccharides are also called "simple sugars", the most important being glucose. Most monosaccharides have a formula that conforms to with n between 3 and 7. Glucose has the molecular formula. The names of typical sugars end with -ose, as in "glucose" and "fructose". Such labels may also refer to any types of these compounds. Fructose, galactose, and glucose are all simple sugars, monosaccharides, with the general formula. They have five hydroxyl groups and a carbonyl group and are cyclic when dissolved in water. They each exist as several isomers with dextro- and laevo-rotatory forms that cause polarized light to diverge to the right or the left.- Fructose, or fruit sugar, occurs naturally in fruits, some root vegetables, cane sugar and honey and is the sweetest of the sugars. It is one of the components of sucrose or table sugar. It is used as a high-fructose syrup, which is manufactured from hydrolyzed corn starch that has been processed to yield corn syrup, with enzymes then added to convert part of the glucose into fructose.
- Galactose generally does not occur in the free state but is a constituent with glucose of the disaccharide lactose or milk sugar. It is less sweet than glucose. It is a component of the antigens found on the surface of red blood cells that determine blood groups.
- Glucose occurs naturally in fruits and plant juices and is the primary product of photosynthesis. Starch is converted into glucose during digestion, and glucose is the form of sugar that is transported around the bodies of animals in the bloodstream. Although in principle there are two enantiomers of glucose, naturally occurring glucose is D-glucose. This is also called dextrose, or grape sugar because drying grape juice produces crystals of dextrose that can be sieved from the other components.
Disaccharides
Lactose, maltose, and sucrose are disaccharides, also called "compound sugars". The share the formula. They are formed by the condensation of two monosaccharide molecules with the expulsion of a molecule of water.- Lactose is the naturally occurring sugar found in milk. A molecule of lactose is formed by the combination of a molecule of galactose with a molecule of glucose. It is broken down when consumed into its constituent parts by the enzyme lactase during digestion. Children have this enzyme but some adults no longer form it and they are unable to digest lactose.
- Maltose is formed during the germination of certain grains, the most notable being barley, which is converted into malt, the source of the sugar's name. A molecule of maltose is formed by the combination of two molecules of glucose. It is less sweet than glucose, fructose or sucrose. It is formed in the body during the digestion of starch by the enzyme amylase and is itself broken down during digestion by the enzyme maltase.
- Sucrose is found in the stems of sugarcane and roots of sugar beet. It also occurs naturally alongside fructose and glucose in other plants, in particular fruits and some roots such as carrots. The different proportions of sugars found in these foods determines the range of sweetness experienced when eating them. A molecule of sucrose is formed by the combination of a molecule of glucose with a molecule of fructose. After being eaten, sucrose is split into its constituent parts during digestion by a number of enzymes known as sucrases.
Polysaccharides
Production
Due to rising demand, sugar production in general increased some 14% over the period 2009 to 2018. The largest importers were China, Indonesia, and the United States.Sugar
In 2022–2023 world production of sugar was 186 million tonnes, and in 2023–2024 an estimated 194 million tonnes — a surplus of 5 million tonnes, according to Ragus.Sugarcane
Sugar cane accounted for around 21% of the global crop production over the 2000–2021 period. The Americas was the leading region in the production of sugar cane.Global production of sugarcane in 2022 was 1.9 billion tonnes, with Brazil producing 38% of the world total and India 23%.
Sugarcane is any of several species, or their hybrids, of giant grasses in the genus Saccharum in the family Poaceae. They have been cultivated in tropical climates in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia over centuries for the sucrose found in their stems.
Sugar cane requires a frost-free climate with sufficient rainfall during the growing season to make full use of the plant's substantial growth potential. The crop is harvested mechanically or by hand, chopped into lengths and conveyed rapidly to the processing plant where it is either milled and the juice extracted with water or extracted by diffusion. The juice is clarified with lime and heated to destroy enzymes. The resulting thin syrup is concentrated in a series of evaporators, after which further water is removed. The resulting supersaturated solution is seeded with sugar crystals, facilitating crystal formation and drying. Molasses is a by-product of the process and the fiber from the stems, known as bagasse, is burned to provide energy for the sugar extraction process. The crystals of raw sugar have a sticky brown coating and either can be used as they are, can be bleached by sulfur dioxide, or can be treated in a carbonatation process to produce a whiter product. About of irrigation water is needed for every of sugar produced.