How dangerous is sugar to our health?

Sugar, if you think about it, is a completely new ingredient: our ancestors spent thousands of years without it, the industrial production of sugar started only in the 1880s. But the appetite for the food industry grew rapidly: if in the early twentieth century the world consumed only 8 million tons of sugar per year, now the same amount is absorbed in about two weeks. And this global diet change could not but affect the health of the population. Gradually, scientists and doctors began to sound the alarm, and activists and politicians now propose even to introduce a sugar tax - by analogy with tobacco and alcohol. How serious is the danger? The therapist and cardiologist, deputy director-general for medicine of the Yusupov hospital Yaroslav Ashikhmin, at the request of Slon Magazine, explained that it is necessary to know about sugar and how to use it to stay healthy.


What do we call sugar?

From the biochemical point of view, low-molecular carbohydrates (oligosaccharides and monosaccharides) are called sugars, many of which have a sweet taste. Sucrose (the usual "sugar" from reed or beet raw materials) is a typical disaccharide, its molecule consists of interconnected molecules of glucose and fructose. Sugars also include milk contained in lactose and used to give a sweet taste to confectionery products of maltose.


Do not confuse sugar and carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are a broader group that also includes polysaccharides-polymers built from a large number of sugar molecules: vegetable starch and animal glycogen, as well as non-digestible cellulose and vegetable fiber. In the Russian labeling of food products (in contrast to European and American), usually only the total amount of carbohydrates is indicated, so it is difficult to understand by the inscription on the packaging what is inside.