Not all that tastes sweet is sugary

1 month ago 13

When babies taste sugar for the first time, a look of delight spreads across their faces. Some wiggle with excitement. It turns out, we’re born with a sweet tooth.

“There’s a reason for that,” says Andrew Odegaard. “We crave it because our body needs it.” Odegaard works at the University of California, Irvine. As an epidemiologist, he studies health in groups of people.

Sugars, the simplest of carbohydrates, are the body’s primary energy source. Our cells run on glucose. It’s one of the main monosaccharides, the basic building blocks of sugars. Table sugar, or sucrose, is made of one molecule of glucose and one of fructose (another monosaccharide). Joined together, the two become a disaccharide (here, “di-“ means two).