Essay about sugar
Sugar is an informal term for a class of edible crystalline substances, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavour. In food, sugar almost exclusively refers to sucrose, which primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet. Other sugars are used in industrial food preparation, but are usually known by more specific names ‑ glucose, fructose or fruit sugar, high fructose corn syrup, etc.
Excessive consumption of sucrose has been associated with increased incidences of type 2 diabetes, obesity and tooth decay.
Sugar consumption varies from country to country; Brazil has the highest per capita production and India has the highest per-country consumption.
Sugar was produced in the Indian subcontinent since ancient times. It was not plentiful or cheap in early times — honey was more often used for sweetening in most parts of the world. During his campaign in India, Alexander the Great was surprised to taste the sweeting agent that was different from honey.
Originally, people chewed sugarcane raw to extract its sweetness. Indians discovered how to crystallize sugar during the Gupta dynasty, around 350 AD. Sugarcane was originally from tropical South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Sugar remained relatively unimportant until the Indians discovered methods of turning sugarcane juice into granulated crystals that were easier to store and to transport. Crystallized sugar was discovered by the time of the Imperial Guptas. Indian sailors, consumers of clarified butter and sugar, carried sugar by various trade routes. Traveling Buddhist monks brought sugar crystallization methods to China. China soon established its first sugarcane cultivation in the seventh century. In South Asia, the Middle East and China, sugar became a staple of cooking and desserts.
During the Muslim Agricultural Revolution, Arab entrepreneurs adopted sugar production techniques from India and then refined and transformed them into a large-scale industry. Arabs set up the first sugar mills, refineries, factories and plantations.
Crusaders brought sugar home with them to Europe after their campaigns in the Holy Land, where they encountered caravans carrying "sweet salt".
In August 1492 Christopher Columbus stopped at Gomera in the Canary Islands, for wine and water, intending to stay only four days, but he stayed for a month. When he finally sailed Governor gave him cuttings of sugarcane, which became the first to reach the New World.
More recently it is manufactured in very large quantities in many countries, largely from sugar cane and sugar beet. In processed foods it has increasingly been supplanted by corn syrup.
Scientifically, sugar loosely refers to monosaccharide or disaccharides. Monosaccharides are also called "simple sugars," the most important being glucose. Almost all sugars have the formula CnH2nOn (n is between 3 and 7). Glucose has the molecular formula C6H12O6. The names of typical sugars end with "-ose," as in "glucose", "dextrose", and "fructose". Sometimes such words may also refer to any types of carbohydrates soluble in water. The acyclic mono- and disaccharides contain either aldehyde groups or ketone groups. These carbon-oxygen double bonds (C=O) are the reactive centres. All saccharides with more than one ring in their structure result from two or more monosaccharides joined by glycoside bonds with the resultant loss of a molecule of water (H2O) per bond.
Monosaccharides in a closed-chain form can form glycosidic bonds with other monosaccharides, creating disaccharides (such as sucrose) and polysaccharides (such as starch). Enzymes must hydrolyse or otherwise break these glycosidic bonds before such compounds become metabolized after digestion and absorption.
The principal monosaccharides present in the blood and internal tissues include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Many pentoses and hexoses can form ring structures. In these closed-chain forms, the aldehyde or ketone group remains unfree, so many of the reactions typical of these groups cannot occur. Glucose in solution exists mostly in the ring form at equilibrium, with less than 0.1% of the molecules in the open-chain form.
Making sugar crystals is one of the original science projects. One of the reasons that this science project is so popular is because it is relatively easy to do and there are fast results. It is easy to see the principles of evaporation and saturation with the sugar crystals. Discovering exactly how sugar crystals grow is a fun and exciting project for adults and children alike.
The basic principle behind growing sugar crystals is to saturate the water with sugar to the point where the water can no longer contain all of the sugar molecules. When this happens, if given the right conditions, the sugar will creep out of the water, forming crystals. This can either happen through over-saturation, or through evaporation.
When a liquid is hot it can contain more molecules than when it is cold. This is because when the molecules are heated, they move around more, making room for more molecules. When the molecules freeze, they slow down and expand, making less room inside a solution for foreign materials. When making a sugar solution designed to make crystals, completely saturate hot water with sugar until no more can dissolve. This makes it possible for the crystals to grow when the water cools.
Even when a water solution has been saturated with sugar, it still takes time for crystals to form. Usually it takes about three weeks to get a good number of crystals. When using the evaporation method of making crystals, it can take even longer than that. The evaporation method of making crystals is the same way that mineral crystals are formed in nature. The water slowly evaporates over time and the mineral (or sugar) deposits are left in a crystal formation. Usually when growing sugar crystals you need to give the crystals something on which to form. This is generally a string suspended above and through the sugar solution. The reason that it is necessary to have the string is so that the crystals form faster and in a way that makes them easier to view. The string acts like a guide for where the crystals should form.
Evaporation is necessary for crystals to form because if the water stayed, then the crystals would never form because they would be absorbed into the water. The evaporation causes the crystals to slowly form as the water leaves the container that the sugar is in.