I'm holding in my hands
one of the most magnificent
powerful
marvelous chemicals in all of the universe
and wondering if you would be okay with me if I had some
Mmmm...
It tastes so good
Intro music
This, my friends, is your run-of-the-mill table sugar
It's made out of some sugar beets...
Or...
from a...
sugar cane...
There's no way to tell which
But henceforth we're going to be...
uhh...
calling it by it's proper name
which is sucrose.
There's a bunch of different kinds of sugars
but they're all sweet tasting, edible, carbohydrates
So, carbohydrates...
probably the tastiest word in the English language
and aside from filling up your snack hole
and making your kids get all spazzy
sugar
is one of the most important chemicals on the planet
They're pretty much the primary source of energy for every thing on Earth
Not this stuff exactly, this stuff is more of the
Ahh...
primary source of all
cavities on Earth
At the cellular level, pretty much every living thing on Earth, when it needs an energy fix
whether it's a plant, an animal or a bacteria
the first they turn to
is sugar.
Now where does sugar come from?
Our earliest word is the energy used to create sugar come from, that of course is our friend the sun.
These lovely sweet compounds are found in every single plant though in vastly varying quantities of course
because it is the primary product of photosynthesis
Now when we talk at all about photosynthesis on the biology crash course channel
and when we do that episode - when we post it online you will see the link down in the description
if you want to learn more about photosynthesis
but for now let's just say that the importance of plants turning carbon dioxide and water and sunlight into sugar
cannot be overstated
Basically,
plants use energy from the sun to split the molecules of water
and the hydrogen from that water is combined with the carbon dioxide
to create glucose
So in effect, this whole process captures the energy of the sun
and stores it as chemical energy in sugar
I'm eating the sun
right now
It's under my tongue
Problem
That was a lot of sugar
Now I'm worried I gonna have a stomach ache
In addition to glucose and other common plant sugars, fructose, which has the same chemical formula
it's just...
rearranged a little bit...
And even though they're very similar and contain the same amount of energy
fructose actually tastes significantly sweeter
which is why we like to put high fructose corn syrup into beverages
That's why we get a wide range of tastiness in plants from super sweet potatoes to "not-sweet-at-all" potatoes
which is why what we generally call starch - which is a complex carbohydrate
is actually a bunch of sugar molecules all linked together
All the way to the sugar in sugarcane is our old friend sucrose
which was actually just a molecule of glucose and a molecule of fructose linked together
Point is
that all these sugars are important
The reason why we think they're so delicious
is because we need energy to survive
and sugar is a really great place to get energy from
And if it seems to you like I've been eating a lot of sugar in this video
Keep in mind that I've maybe had about two...
two, three teaspoons so far?
The average American has about twenty-two per day
so I've got a long way to go
Twenty-two teaspoons a day, people
That cannot be healthy
I did a little bit of research
and I discovered last night that just from drinking soda
the average American drinks about fifty pounds of sugar a year
We Americans generally have a heck of a lot more sugar than we need to have
We should probably having more like six to nine teaspoons a day
so you might want to rethink that all Captain Crunch diet you're currently on
I'm not really designed for a world
where sugar is infinitely available
It's certainly pretty hard to come by something really sweet in nature
and even if you find something - like a bunch of apples
it's hard to eat a lot of apples without making yourself pretty sick
Nowadays we've gotten around that by producing this wonderful white powder
as well as the high fructose corn syrup that they put in absolutely everything these days
So if you want my health advice...
try and maybe eat the way that your caveman ancestors did
fruits and vegetables
maybe some complex carbohydrates here and there
And I would suggest overall to not consume sugar
in this manner
Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow
If you wanna learn more about sugar, check the links in the description
You can also ask us questions, which we'll be happy to answer
and suggest other topics for SciSchow in the YouTube comments.
Hook up with us on Facebook and Twitter as well.
Goodbye
End credits music