Читать книгу Goodbye Sugar - HOMEMADE LOVING'S - Страница 4

You know sugar as small white or brown crystals in 1 kg packaging from the supermarket. You might also be thinking of candy for tea, icing sugar or the coarser sugar used to decorate baked goods. Gelling sugar for jam, liquid glucose syrup for the confectionery trade or for homemade sweets and other types of sugar are all the same at the end of the day, and are the worst fatteners in society. But what exactly is sugar and what makes it so bad?

The word "sugar" describes household sugar, i.e. the white and brown crystals in the package. What you add to your coffee or use for baking is mostly pure sucrose from a chemical point of view. This in turn means that it is a carbohydrate.

There are three macronutrients, i.e. nutrients that we do not only need in homeopathic doses. These are proteins, carbohydrates and fat. Proteins are found in meat, for example, but also in many plant foods such as beans. We renew our cells from proteins and expand our muscles, which is why athletes also have to add protein in the form of shakes. Fat serves the body as a binding agent and is used by the body like oil in mechanical engineering. However, it also plays an important role in cell production. Carbohydrates are the energy suppliers, in a sense the "gasoline" of the body. So it doesn't work without it, but if you have too much energy, then it has to go somewhere. The body tries to store them temporarily, and you notice that by producing more fat cells you gain weight. Carbohydrates are contained in everything that contains sugar.

But then again carbohydrates are not that simple.

There are short-chain and long-chain carbohydrates. They bear this designation because of their appearance under the microscope. Compared to the long-chain variant, short-chain carbohydrates consist of less contiguous molecules. Their compounds are also not as strong as those of long-chain carbohydrates.

The household sugar belongs to the short-chain carbohydrates. This means that this chemical compound is relatively easy to break down and it does not take long until the individual components are available for use, i.e. to supply energy. Long-chain carbohydrates present the body with greater challenges because it already uses more energy to get this chemical compound into a usable form at all.

So sugar is a kind of turbo fuel. It gives the body a quickly available energy kick. However, this cannot last long, because the chemical compound can be broken down so quickly that the substances supplied by the food are immediately gone as soon as they have been eaten.