What makes sweets

The body rewarded people for searching long and hard for sweet foods, such as fruit. After people learned to grow the plants and raise the animals they needed for food, sweets became much easier to find. Today, it is rare to find a packaged food that does not have extra sugar added. As a result, many of us eat so much sugar that it can harm our health.

Science Questions Why do sweets taste so good? Children, in particular, need this energy to fuel their rapid growth. Sugar also helps us store fat, which can be drawn on later should we need it. In the times of pre-human primates and early humans, those who ate the most calories had a better shot at survival and thus at passing on their genes.

Fruit, the most common natural source of sugar, could provide more energy than other sources of food, like vegetables, but was relatively scarce. So some scientists suggest that those early humans that ate the most fruit lived longer and had more babies. Those future generations may have then evolved to crave that sugary fruit as an important part of their survival. Now, of course, sugar is no longer scarce and we consume it in much larger quantities than the occasional rare fruit.

We also extract sugar from fruit and then concentrate it into things like juices and candies. This makes it easier to consume larger quantities of sugar than our body needs. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.

What makes these treats so sweet? Well, sweetener of course! The sugar used in cupcakes, candy and other desserts can come from a variety of sources. Sugarcane is a tropical plant that looks something like bamboo. Sugarcane is grown in tropical climates in states like Louisiana, Texas, Florida and Hawaii. Sugar is made in the leaves of the sugarcane plant through photosynthesis and stored as a sweet juice in sugarcane stalks.

Sugarcane is cut down and harvested then sent to a factory. At the factory, cane juice is extracted, purified, filtered and crystalized into golden, raw sugar. This raw sugar is then taking to a refinery to be made into the table sugar we know and love. Watch this video to learn more!

It also comes from sugar beets! In sugar beets, the sugar is found in the roots. The sugar beets are then washed, sliced and boiled in water to begin the extraction of sugar. This is then filtered and crystalized. This video shows more about the sugar beet harvest! To make corn syrup, corn is harvested and sent to a mill.

Corn is crushed and filtered in the mill to separate cornstarch from other parts of corn. Enzymes are then added to the cornstarch liquid to breakdown the corn starch into individual glucose molecules As the name implies, high fructose corn syrup is corn syrup where glucose has partially changed into fructose a different sugar.

There are a lot of myths out there about high fructose corn syrup. The Corn Refiners Association helps bust some of these misconceptions. You probably think of bees when you hear honey, but how exactly is it made?