Real sugar; making life sweeter since 8000 BCE

It’s hard to believe that August is almost over, and the fall harvest is starting up around the country. As a little break from the DC policy agenda and in honor of “back to school”, this is a great time for a mini session of Sugar 101.

The chemical name for sugar is sucrose. It’s a simple carbohydrate, produced naturally in all plants – including fruits, vegetables, and nuts – through photosynthesis. However, of all plant types, sugar beets and sugar cane produce the greatest quantities of sucrose, making them the most efficient plants from which to extract sugar. Despite the ubiquity of sucrose naturally present in green plants, when it comes to sugar in the food supply, the Food and Drug Administration defines sugar as sucrose from sugar beets and sugar cane.

The sucrose that’s extracted from sugar beet or sugar cane plants is chemically identical to the sucrose found when you bite into fruits and vegetables. That means the bag of sugar in your pantry, the spoonful of sugar you might add to coffee or tea, and the sugar that helps bread rise is the same molecule as the sucrose that’s in peaches, almonds, mangos, sweet peas and more.

You may be wondering what sucrose is made of. Well, sucrose (remember, that’s sugar) consists of two molecules – one glucose and one fructose. Glucose and fructose are two of the three building blocks that make up all forms of carbohydrates (the third is galactose). These three molecules are also called simple sugars or monosaccharides. They can bond with each other (i.e. glucose + galactose = lactose) and themselves to make more complex carbohydrates (i.e. glucose + lots of glucose = starch). So – in a nutshell – sugar is a carbohydrate, and all carbohydrates are broken down to these three simple sugars (glucose, fructose and galactose) during digestion.

For sugar, this sweet chemistry is the work of Mother Nature on farms, not scientists in a laboratory. Sugar beets, which contain about 16% sucrose, are a root crop – but much bigger than the red beets you might see in the produce section of a grocery store. They weigh about 3-5 pounds when harvested and grow best in cooler climates where the soil is rich and the growing season is about five months long. Sugar beet farms can be found in California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.

Sugar cane, which contains about 14% sucrose, is a perennial grass (a very tall one – 10 to 20 feet high!) that is grown in more tropical climates closer to the equator. Perennial plants grow back every year, so when sugar cane is harvested, it’s cut just above the root level. New sprouts grow and are ready to be harvested again in 10-12 months. Today, two U.S. states grow sugar cane: Florida and Louisiana.

In the US, sugar beet and sugar cane growers operate family farms. On the Sugar Association website, we’ve gathered some farmer stories to help people get to know some of the passionate individuals who work hard to bring us nature’s oldest sweetener.

If you’d like to learn more about where sugar comes from, what it is, how it functions in food, and how it can fit in a healthy, balanced diet, you can find more information and resources on our website, including resources for dietitians and health professionals , resources for educators , resources for families , and more.