About sugar from the point of view of a chemist. Chemistry in the kitchen 2

The old form of packing sugar - "sugar head"
Spread the sequel, as promised. The first post was about salt .
About sugar. What are the sugar. Is it about maple sugar and sugar? Maple juice icicles are a valuable gift of nature. Mono- and polyaccharides. What do lobster, tarantula, tree, mushroom, honey and Qassam rocket have in common? We put a chemical experiment in the conversion of starch ... How to show off erudition. Fructose - benefit and harm, two sides of the issue. Who is to blame for the stomach ache from milk? How is it that sour jam is less sugared. What make honey. What is sugar made from? About cane sugar - we eat for the sake of its taste.
Hello! Something after the stories about the "white death", I wanted to talk about the "sweet." This is such a pun, a joke of humor. The issue of harm, and in this case, as you can already guess, is mainly in excessive consumption. Well, it means that there are many different varieties of sugar on the shelf, both from local and newcomers, and they begin to find out which one is better ... Stop! Do not allow the massacre, and see for yourself.



Maple Sap Syrup

So let's start the debriefing with him, because its not enough and the thing is interesting. This is a traditional product, which was obtained in the USA and Canada, at a time when there was no sugar beet sugar, and cane was expensive. Get it by evaporation of spring maple juice. By the way, you probably know that just like from birch, in the spring, it is possible to extract sap from maple, and not necessarily in America. During my stay in Troitsk near Moscow, there was such a spring that the frost was still holding, and in the trees the sap had already moved. As a result, icicles began to grow from all the cracks and breaks on the branches.
')

Really delicious icicles

Having calculated the nature of the formation of these strangely high-hanging icicles - I tasted them ... generally, the first juice from any tree is sweet, gives wood, some species of trees gave very tasty, some - with an unpleasant aftertaste, but sweet. So there is nothing surprising in maple sugar, but there are quite a lot of mineral substances, and its sweetness is determined ... Oops!

Why, it turns out that it is not sugar at all, but only its close chemical relative, glucose. It is obtained in the tree by splitting starch accumulated in the fall. So, easily and naturally, we came to the topic of mono, di, and polysaccharides. I will try to clarify. Sugar is a whole class of compounds, they are also called carbohydrates. In fact, there is some semantic difference between them, vague, but we are unlikely to be ashamed of her ignorance. In general, the vegetable kingdom, it turns out, mainly consists of a variety of carbohydrates or in a different way poly-, oligo-, tri-, di- and monosaccharides. However, some of them are sweet ... Surprised?

So: in general, in chemistry, does it mean sugar or carbohydrates? Well, they were called so because, at the beginning of the development of chemistry, their analysis showed that they consist of a mixture of water and carbon molecules. At that time, they had not yet penetrated into the subtleties of the structure of the molecule — that is, how atoms are interconnected. And is it important. The analysis, most often, was carried out in the simplest way - burning and weighing. After burning, the amount of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen contained in the sample of a substance became known. And it’s clear that sugar was sugar at hand, and things chemically similar to it became known as (mono, di ... poly-) as saccharides or carbohydrates. The simplest sugar molecules that could no longer be split by boiling in water with acid were called monosaccharides — sugars, one molecule of which was split into two monosaccharide molecules — were called disaccharides. Oligosaccharides are sugars consisting of a small amount of monosaccharides. At this point, everyone makes up a pleasant joke for him about oligarchs and oligosaccharides. It begs. Polysaccharides are various natural polymers from monosaccharides.

You'd be surprised, but the shell of a crab, the skin of a tarantula and the main substance of mushrooms, consist of a polysaccharide - chitin. Oh, what a temptation - to start production - "crab sugar." Or "scorpion", but at least "mushroom". Or even vodka. Not! Does not work. Chitin monosaccharide, though not sweet, but very interesting. This glucosamine is a popular remedy for joint pain. Although official medicine and experiments show that placebo works almost as well. Only now, if it really hurts, then a positive effect was noticed. Although many people swear that really helps them. This substance can be made from shrimp skins. But if you make trisaccharide - chitosan from this chitin, you will get a means for losing weight and a promising tool for healing wounds. Powerful polysaccharide - cellulose (it consists of glucose, by the way), um ... trees, paper, cotton and smokeless powder are made of it. The first artificial plastic was made from nitrocellulose and made balls for billiards and keys for pianos out of it. Before that I had to use ivory.

Pectin is also a polysaccharide, natural, it is plentiful in apples and citrus fruits (and not only). The monosaccharide that it consists of is not very familiar to us and I can’t say anything interesting about it, but I’m not going to ship you unnecessary. The beauty of pectin is that it is easy and pleasant to extract it from the cake from the juice of the juice. In general, raw materials are in bulk. And this is not some kind of synthetics, quite a natural product. Antique marmalade and marshmallow - they owed their origin to apples, or rather their pectin. Apparently, they simply added boiled apple cake to the old marshmallow — well, or not very cleaned, they even came across like sawdust from apple seeds, so it was grayish and had an interesting, natural taste. There, in the composition, apples appear or apple pectin. I do not remember.


It looks like apple marmalade since my youth

And apple marmalade treated with natural pectin, obtained from apples during cooking. Pectin is almost not absorbed by the body, but it combines well with ions of heavy metals and radionuclides (which is the same, it does not feel radiation, it feels heavy metal. Chemistry) - this is used in medicine. A good property for a food additive is to block toxic heavy metals (many of the heavy metals are poisonous).


Glycogen cross section. In the middle - protein. Around - a coat of glucose particles.

And here is another polysaccharide - glycogen, the main reserve carbohydrate of humans and animals. It is deposited in the muscles and the liver. Unlike energy stored in fats, glycogen splits quickly, but its reserves are small. This is an energy reserve for relatively short time loads.

Well, the common carbohydrate - starch. From carbohydrates, until now, it is him, we eat the most. Monosaccharide from which starch is built - glucose. Therefore, we eat.


This is how chemists draw glycogen and starch molecules.

Attention, experience! I suggest a chemical experience for homework. Do on an empty stomach. The hungrier you are, the higher the activity of the amylase enzyme in your saliva. Take a piece of bread, black, savory and chew. Long. As you chew, you will see that bread becomes sweeter and sweeter. Starch in bread, under the action of the enzyme amylase, turns into sweet maltose (glucose). That's the lab!

And yet, if you heat the starch (to the appropriate temperature), then it will become "modified" or in the old "dextrin". It will just get better dissolved, even in cold water. Not to be confused with GM! Therefore, cooks often fry flour for making sauce - it will disperse in warm water, and there will be no lumps when preparing the sauce. You can make bechamel sauce, and consider it homework - take a recipe from the Internet.


Flour turns into elegant sauce

In the title, he promised to mention the Qassam Arab popular rocket; it has to do with sugar that its fuel consists of a mixture of sugar and fertilizer, nitrate. Very budget option. Fans of low-cost home rocketry also respect the mixture of melted sugar and nitrate, because of comparative safety, ease of operation and availability.

So there are many relatives of our sugar - like a Chinese with the name Wang. We went over all this wealth. Just to be interesting.

And now, attention! The thing you need to know is to be a subtle expert in chemistry: - carbohydrates, it's all made of sugars and starch (they usually say so about what they eat, but, as we have seen, this is not quite so - lobster shell is hard to devour, and even harder to master ). Hydrocarbons - it's all stinking of gasoline and fuel, even gas. It is eaten in the only case - petroleum jelly with constipation. Yes, and then, because, as he entered, he went out, well, can not be assimilated. It is simple to remember - (carbon) hydrogen is a gas, you cannot eat it, (carbon) water is water, you can drink it, which means it is edible. Now you can flash erudition on any get-together. And with translations.

So. We found out that there are a lot of these and mono and other sugars. Do not dramatize. In real life, we care about very few of them. We will talk about them. Glucose and fructose monosaccharides are used by us in a pure form and are even easily digested.

Glucose is absorbed instantly. Actually, it is spread by the blood in our body, for energy, as fuel.

Fructose - in pure form, this monosaccharide began to be produced relatively recently, about 30-50 years ago. Before that, it was harvested in its pure form, it seems, from gladiolus tubers. To separate fructose from glucose, for example from honey, they did not know how. And so she was the medicine. Fructose was considered a good sugar substitute - it is one and a half times sweeter than it, which means it will bring fewer calories, it does not increase blood sugar levels, it is not absorbed as quickly as glucose, which means it will not be immediately deposited in fat. It does less harm to teeth than sugar, because it is worse absorbed by microbes. Now, when fructose was learned to make cheap and a lot of sugar, other factors began to emerge. It turned out that although it is sweeter, people use no less fructose, and they drink sweeter ones. Another thing is that glucose instantly gets into the bloodstream and one of the mechanisms of saturation starts working in us - the level of glucose grows and there is no longer any desire. The second mechanism is based on the response of the stomach full sensor 8)). More - fructose is absorbed only by the liver, so that with an excess of calories, it is also stored in fat there. And what conclusion can be made? If you have what you need, and to regulate the caloric content of your food and the amount of movement, foods with fructose will not bring harm. But with real people, this is not always the case. So who is to blame for fructose or overeating? "The girl was to blame for the fact that the man molested her - she was too beautiful."

So, definitely - if you are hungry and drink some fructose-containing drink, it will be useful. Excess - no. I’ll add some facts so you can take a more philosophical look at publications on fructose. Our favorite sugar (chemists call it sucrose) is a disaccharide, its molecule is molded from one molecule of glucose and one fructose. In the body, it necessarily splits into fructose and glucose. And it was from time immemorial. Bee honey - as it was somewhere beautifully defined - "burping insects from semi-digested secretions of the genital organs of plants." Hehe. So, in honey, fructose and glucose in half. Fructose in fruits - in general, unequivocally, is useful - apples, pears, figs - contain quite a lot of fructose. So, I see the cause of harm - overeating, caused by unnaturally tasty foods. And here's another touch. We forgot about it, but it was, and it was good. Invert sugar. And what is it? The sugar solution was boiled with a small amount of sulfuric acid. Yes, while the sucrose molecule fell apart on the original fructose and glucose. Acid precipitated with chalk. Excess chalk and the resulting gypsum was filtered. As you can see, nothing criminal. Gypsum, chalk - sources of calcium. And what is the meaning of the reaction? The resulting solution was one and a half times sweeter than the original sugar. Due to the sweetness of fructose and glucose.

The same happens in bees, only they use a special enzyme. This solution has another unobvious plus. It is candied much slower than the original sugar syrup. Bees know this too, it is difficult for them to work with candied honey - there are no spoons and no teeth. Why is sugar more difficult? Just do not be offended (in the voice of Mkrtchan - from Mimino), I will tell you now one obvious thing for a chemist: - When a crystal grows, of any substance - only molecules of the type from which this crystal is built grow onto its surface. In any case, they strive for this. And much. Therefore, recrystallization, since ancient times, is the favorite way to purify a multitude of substances. Dissolved dirty, grown crystals, the remains are separated, the crystals will be much cleaner. So, when we have two different sugars in the solution, the possible growth centers of the crystal only see their molecules and it turns out that there are two times less opportunities for crystal growth (sugaring).

A little about honey. Honey product is historically popular and consecrated by tradition. Even the ancient Romans tasted honey drink in half with grape juice. And nothing they do not stick together. It is difficult for us to penetrate those sensations. Yes, in those days there was nothing as concentrated sweet and nutritious as honey. The food was rather coarse, low in fat and with a very small amount of sweets, so the eating of honey caused an unusually fast surge of strength and satiety. Even from a small amount. In the film “The Legend of Narayama”, people are extremely poor, they feed almost on hard-to-bean beans. One of the old women was going to die. It became bad for her. Before her death, she was cooked rice - a much more easily digestible product. The old woman ate and - she felt good, she recovered. Thanks to the miraculous power of rice.

The process of collecting and preparing honey by the bees is also impressive. Handmade, but how small! First, the bee flies around a thousand flowers and collects 70 milligrams of nectar, takes it to the hive, where special workers chew it for fermentation for a long time, then spread it over honeycombs and evaporate it to the desired condition by flapping its wings. Sealed with wax. And only then honey is ready. From the chemical point of view, honey consists mainly of a mixture of fructose, glucose and very few other sugars. The remaining substances make up about 3%. I am afraid to incite the wrath of readers, but do not forget - I’m a chemist: advertising publications about the composition of honey are vague and illogical, as well as about the Himalayan salt. There are a few enzymes, mainly amylase - honey with hot tea, leads to the destruction of enzymes that were there (amylase and others, if they survived, it is not difficult to destroy them, even with a little heat). Again, the enzyme is a natural catalyst, an accelerator of some kind of chemical reaction. Well, there is an enzyme in honey that breaks down starch into maltose and sucrose into glucose and fructose, but what is the use of this? Slightly better the roll is learned. Not for love. People and children are allergic to honey, sometimes they don’t like honey. No need to worry, there are many other useful products in the world. But! Let's remember the metaphor that a person is the sum of “hard” and “soft”. Software is our emotions, feelings, beliefs and faith. If you are pleased and well to drink tea with honey - drink to your health, it will be useful. How to choose a good honey - I will not say, I do not know. I do not buy it at all, my uncle's wife is a beekeeper. Gives.

I will say a little about other sugars, various di- and trisaccharides. For example, in peas there is a certain trisaccharide, which, in our majority, is not absorbed. But intestinal microbes begin to devour it eagerly. The result is a rumbling in the stomach, and I will not be afraid of this expression: - “the emission of winds”. In milk, another sugar is lactose, which is far from being absorbed by all people. That is, young children have an enzyme for its cleavage, and in adults its activity may fall completely. In general, a mutation that allows digesting dairy sugar appeared in Europe 5,000 years ago, and is associated with the domestication of dairy cattle. So, if you have a stomach ache from milk, you are not a European. And if you can drink milk in liters, then you are a European mutant. This is a joke.

Let us now go from these terrible problems to our simple, kind, sweet sucrose. So, it is mined in two ways: - the first one is the most familiar and familiar to us - from sugar beet (it is white). By the way, have you tried it?


Sugar beets - the taste is not very

But sweet. So, sugar is washed from beet chips. The resulting brown solution is cleaned of impurities from lime, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide - sulfur dioxide gas, this is a stinky gas produced by burning sulfur, they are cleaned of basements and greenhouses from all sorts of fungi and pests, give wonderful light color of dried apricots and raisins. There is no harm from him, he is safely neutralized and turns into harmless sulfates. So, the solution is evaporated, and to obtain refined sugar, treated with activated charcoal. It binds on its surface all coloring and smelly substances and it turns out quite transparent solution. By the way, beet sugar, traditionally cleaned with coal from hard wood, but refined cane (which becomes completely white) is traditionally cleaned with bone char. , ( , - , , , , ). (?). , . , . — , , . -. -. - . — . , . , - . .




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