From chocolate cookies to crisp, juicy apples, we humans are sweet on sugar. And that’s only natural. All plants and animals need sugar to live. It’s the fuel that powers our cells. So it’s not surprising we’re hard-wired to crave the sweet stuff.
Building Sweet
“Sugar” is the name for many different sweet-tasting molecules. They’re all made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms.
There are three basic sugar building blocks, or “simple sugars.” These are called fructose, glucose, and galactose. All of the simple sugars can be found in plants. Fructose is what makes fruits taste sweet, for example.
Combining these simple sugars makes other kinds of sugar. The most common is sucrose, also called table sugar. The sugar your family keeps in the kitchen for baking, or in the…
