Does Sucrose Not Make You Fat?
What is the history of the development of sucrose?
The origin of sugar cane may be New Guinea, and later spread to the South Sea Islands and India. It was introduced into southern China around the time of King Zhou Xuan of the Zhou Dynasty.
“Sucrose” (sugar, sucrose) from all over the world and “Xiji Shimi” and “Xiguo Shimi” in ancient China all contain the root word “sacca”, which comes from the Sanskrit word sakara. It shows that the origin of sucrose is ancient India, and it was introduced to China and the rest of the world through the Silk Road.
In the Dunhuang fragments, there is a record about sugar production in India. When it comes to the production of sugar cane in India, it can be said that the highest “sha cut order” can be made. According to Ji Xianlin’s interpretation, “sha cut order” is the transliteration of Sanskrit sakara, which proves that Indian sugar making technology was indeed introduced to China through the Silk Road.
The method of making sucrose in India is to squeeze sugar cane to extract sugar cane juice, sun it into syrup, and then decoct it with fire to become sakara. Sanskrit sakara also means “stone”. The “stone” sugar from India was introduced to China in the Han Dynasty. The “stone honey”, “Xiji stone honey” and “Xiguo stone honey” in the literature of the Han Dynasty refer to the “stone” sugar imported from the Western Regions; “Xiji” is the antiphonal of the Sanskrit word sakara, and “Shimi” is the free translation of the Sanskrit word sakara.
Stone honey is today’s sliced sugar.
Later, the sugar refining technique in India was further improved: sugarcane was squeezed out of sugarcane juice, smelted with fire, and milk or lime was continuously added to stir together. The milk or lime and impurities in the syrup condensed into slag, and the color of the original brown syrup turned into slag. Light, after repeated impurity removal processes, light yellow granulated sugar is finally obtained. “New Book of Tang” records that Tang Taizong sent an envoy to Magadha (India) to learn the method of boiling sugar, which shows that the Indian sugar refining technique was introduced to China in the Tang Dynasty.
In the early Northern Song Dynasty, Sanfoqi and Dashi paid tribute to white sugar. White granulated sugar is further refined from stone honey. It is in the state of sand particles, light yellow in color, lighter than stone honey, not as white as snow.
In the Song Dynasty, the world’s first monograph on sugar cane refining technique “Frosting Spectrum” appeared.
Sugar production has become an important industry, and there are many kinds of sugar products, such as fragrant candy, lion candy, flower flower candy, gum gum candy, sesame candy, hammer candy, bayberry candy and so on.
Italian traveler Marco Polo’s “Travel Notes” describes the sugar industry in Wugan, China. At first, he didn’t know how to refine sugar as exquisite as that produced in Babylonia. It is also said that the sugar refined in Fuzhou is “very white”.
Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta’s “Ibn Battuta’s Travel Notes” said: “China produces a large amount of sucrose, and its quality is even better than that of Egypt.”
Ming Song Yingxing’s “Tiangong Kaiwu”, the sixth volume “Ganxi”, describes in detail the method of making white sugar and rock sugar:
White sugar production method: Squeeze cane juice from sugarcane that has matured in the winter with a ramming car, put it in a tank, boil it with fire to make a yellow-black syrup, pour it into another tank and condense it into black sugar; Put a tile (tile funnel), plug the leak of the tile with straw, pour black sugar into the tile funnel, wait for the black sand to settle, remove the straw, and pour the black sugar in the funnel with yellow mud water, black The slag flows from the funnel into the vat below, and hoarfrost is left in the funnel. The top layer is about five inches, very white, called Xiyangtang (Xiyang in Ming Dynasty is now Nanyang).
The method of making rock sugar: fry and melt white sugar, add eggs to remove impurities, and when the heat is right, break the new green bamboo into bamboo strips, chop them into one-inch lengths, put them into the melted white sugar, and condense into rock sugar after one night.
Ji Xianlin said in his book “The History of Cane Sugar in China” that the “yellow mud water decolorization method of boiling white sugar in the Ming Dynasty in China is a great invention in China”, and pointed out that
In von Lippmann’s “History of Sugar”, there is not a single word about the yellow mud water decolorization method.
In addition to “Tiangong Kaiwu”, “Min Shu Nan Chan Zhi”, Fang Yizhi’s “Little Knowledge of Physics”, Liu Xianting’s “Guangyang Miscellaneous Notes”, and “Xinghua Fuzhi” all have yellow muddy water about boiling white sugar. Description of the leaching and decolorization method. It proves that the yellow mud water leaching decolorization method was invented by the Chinese.
What Are the 7 Most Common Sugars?
1. Brown sugar
Brown sugar is the least refined sugar and has the highest nutritional value. Apart from sucrose, it still retains some vitamins and minerals, which is beneficial to the body’s acid-base balance and metabolism. Girls can also drink some brown sugar water during menstrual period to activate blood and let Menstrual flow is smoother, and energy is replenished at the same time.
2. Brown sugar
Brown sugar and brown sugar are basically the same thing, but brown sugar has a higher proportion of molasses than brown sugar, but it is still a sugar with high nutritional value. Brown sugar is also helpful for replenishing physical strength and activating qi and blood. It is a warm thing, so people who are cold and weak can eat more brown sugar to nourish and warm their bodies, or drinking some brown sugar water when they have a cold or illness can also have the effect of dispelling cold.
3. Granulated sugar/white sugar
Granulated sugar is a sugar with a high degree of refining. After decolorization, it becomes our common white sugar, which is mainly used for seasoning. The nutritional value of both is not high, and after entering the body, the blood will become more acidic, which will cause adverse effects on the human body, so excessive intake is not suitable. Because of the high sugar content of white sugar, if you have stomachache, low blood sugar and feel dizzy, drinking white sugar water can relieve the pain and discomfort in a timely manner.
4. Rock candy
White granulated sugar crystallizes into rock sugar, which is the sugar with the highest purity. It can be eaten as candy and is often used to make desserts, such as candied haws and pears in rock sugar. In traditional Chinese medicine, it is a cool food, so it has the effect of clearing the fire and moistening the lungs. If the cold is a dry cough without phlegm, you can stew pears with rock sugar to relieve symptoms.
Rock sugar is the sugar with the highest sugar purity. Tomatoes coated with rock sugar are one of the children’s favorite foods.
In addition to sucrose, the following are several common sugars.
5. High fructose syrup
The synthetic high fructose syrup used in beverages is low in cost, high in sweetness (about 1.6 times that of sucrose) and easy to dissolve, so it is widely used in food. However, in addition to obesity problems, excessive intake of high fructose syrup can also cause fatty liver, heart disease, hyperlipidemia, gout, dementia, cancer, metabolic syndrome and other diseases. Studies have also pointed out that eating too much high fructose syrup will cause phenomenon of addiction.
6. Artificial sugar substitutes
The artificial sugar substitutes used in low-calorie or sugar-free drinks have no calories but are sweet. Currently, they are safe sugars that are allowed to be used. Physicians will also recommend diabetics to use sugar substitutes instead of ordinary sugars. However, patients with phenylketonuria cannot eat it, and some studies have pointed out that artificial sugar substitutes may cause chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, and zero calories may not be the best.
7. Honey
Many people think that honey is a relatively natural sugar, and there should be no health concerns. However, the main components of honey are glucose and fructose, and the calories are not low. Excessive intake can also cause obesity. It is still necessary to eat in moderation to eat healthy .
Fructose can easily cause fatty liver, and sucrose is more natural?
A new study published in the “Journal of Hepatology” found that even a moderate intake of sugar can still double the risk of fatty liver. The sugars that cause fatty liver in the study include sucrose and fructose.
A research team from the University of Zurich in Switzerland recruited 94 subjects and asked them to drink sugar-sweetened beverages containing fructose, sucrose (50% fructose and 50% glucose) and glucose every day. 80 grams of sugar, the control group did not drink.
After tracking for 7 weeks, the researchers observed the relationship between sugar and lipid metabolism in the subjects, and found that although the subjects did not take in more calories, the subjects in the fructose group and sucrose group had significantly more fat production in the liver. It was more than twice that of the glucose group or the control group, and it is worth noting that this situation persisted 12 hours after eating or drinking. “80 grams of sugar is equivalent to 800ml of ordinary soda, but even without taking in more sugar, it was found that the condition of fat hyperplasia lasted for a while,” said Philip, a senior researcher at the University of Zurich. Burger (Philipp Gerber) pointed out.
However, Huang Shuhui, a nutritionist at Postal Hospital, believes, “This is a direct comparison of the values of the sucrose and glucose groups, and the values of the fructose and glucose groups. This does not mean that sucrose promotes fat synthesis more easily than fructose.”
Studies have confirmed that fructose and sucrose in sugary drinks can significantly increase the ability of the human liver to synthesize fat, but glucose will not have a similar effect. The researchers also showed that even modest amounts of added fructose and sucrose doubled the body’s own fat production in the liver. Experts worry that such a phenomenon may increase the possibility of fatty liver and diabetes in the future.
Are fructose and sucrose refined sugar?
In fact, both sucrose and fructose are refined sugars, which cannot be said to be healthy choices. Eating too much may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and chronic inflammation.
Rather than arguing about which is better, sucrose or fructose, Huang Shuhui pointed out that it is better to focus on the amount of activity and intake. In fact, if you only ingest a small amount of fructose, most of it will be metabolized by intestinal wall cells in the small intestine and converted into glucose and lactic acid. It is used, but if you take too much, it will come to the liver, promote fat regeneration, increase uric acid, and triglycerides in the blood will also increase, causing fatty liver and other diseases. For those who are active enough, fructose can be transformed and utilized immediately, so it is not necessary to completely quit refined sugar, or even dare not eat fruit. The key is to strike a balance between intake and lifestyle.
“Past experiments on mice have found that when fructose is consumed less than 0.5 grams per kilogram of body weight, almost all of the fructose will be metabolized in the small intestine, and interestingly, the study also found that the ability of the small intestine to process fructose is better after meals, so meals Eating some fruits later may not have such a big impact on the liver, and it is best not to pick up sugar intake on an empty stomach, but at present there are only experimental results in mice, and no human standards have been set yet,” Huang Shuhui said.
The World Health Organization recommends that the intake of sugar should be less than 10% of the total calories, and it would be better if it could be reduced to 5% of the total calories. The total calorie and sugar intake can be judged by the amount of daily activity. Taking a 50 kg OL with light activity as an example, her daily recommended calorie intake is 1,500 calories, and the sugar intake should be less than 150 calories. You can only eat no more than 38 grams of sugar per day; if you are a white-collar male who weighs 80 kg and works lightly, you should not eat more than 60 grams of sugar a day.
Taking an 80-kg white-collar male who works lightly as an example, the formula for calculating the daily sugar intake is:
80 kg X30 cal = 2,400 cal
10% of 2,400 calories is 240 calories
240 calories/4 calories (1 gram of sugar = 4 calories) = about 60 grams of sugar
Why is Sucrose Sweet?
Sweetness is usually felt on the tip of the tongue. There is a theory of sweetness related to molecular structure, which holds that many sweet chemical substances have two groups capable of forming hydrogen bonds with a distance of 0.3 nm, and these two groups must be separated and not combined with each other. The tongue has a side that cooperates to form hydrogen bonds, which can be represented by the following figure.
Schematic diagram of sweetness perception
When a portion of the sweet substance bonds to one side of the tongue, special nerve cells send a series of messages to sense sweetness. The sweetening groups of sucrose and saccharin (o-sulfonylbenzimide) are shown in the diagram below.
Sweetening groups of sucrose and saccharin
The sweetness of saccharin is 300-500 times higher than that of sucrose. This sweetness theory fails to explain this and needs to be explored further.