Known from the course high school. But the world and science do not stand still, technological progress finds many new sources of energy, one of which is sugar. The beginning of the new millennium was also marked by the fact that molecules were discovered in gaseous clouds in open space, not anywhere, but practically in the central part of the Milky Way.
There is nowhere to go - sugar destroys and helps to remove one of the most useful and necessary elements from our body -. Problems with teeth, bone tissue and red blood cells are slowly approaching lovers of excessive amounts of sugar and sweets, as well as all carbonated drinks in which the percentage of sugar is 90 and above.
- preservative and antiseptic. Not only jams and jams, but also many types of pickles and other preserves in their recipes certainly contain sugar. Extends the life of cut flowers by adding a few grains to water.
- Medicine. Sucrose stimulates the mental development of infants, and the drug Obecalp, almost entirely composed of sugar, has become an indispensable assistant for many parents with children who like to complain about fictitious sores. If you bring a mirror to the name of the pills, much becomes clear.
- Fuel. Motorists use sugar beet fuel already in many countries, now it's up to jet fuel. Work is underway.
- Construction material. Sugar is indispensable for building carbohydrates. Energy, one of the main sources of which is sugar, is necessary for important and useful things, as well as for the joy of life.
Of course, it’s not worth crushing with spoons and handfuls, but you can’t completely deny yourself the little pleasure of indulging in a cup of aromatic coffee with a crystal of caramel sugar.
297 years ago, in June 1720, the first sugar factory in the country was opened in St. Petersburg. The idea of creating such a production belonged to Peter the Great. The enterprise grew up on the current Vyborgskaya embankment not far from the state-owned pier, which received foreign ships. This place was called the Sugar Yard for a long time. Since then, the sweet delicacy has become available to ordinary people, whereas before it was tasted only by the highest nobility.
The birthplace of sugar is India, where it was traditionally made from sugar cane. At first, for the production of sweets in Russia, raw materials were imported from abroad. However, in 1747, the German chemist Andreas Marggraf discovered that sugar, which had previously been obtained from sugar cane, was also found in sugar beets. The discovery quickly found application in Europe, and later, at the beginning of the 19th century, in Russia.
Today, many labels have been hung on this product. On the one hand, the words "sweet", "sugar" we designate phenomena and objects that are positive and pleasant. On the other hand, we call sugar "sweet death". The site has collected some interesting and little-known facts about him.
Initially, sugar made from sugar cane was eaten in Russia. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
Sugar addiction is like a drug addiction
“I can’t live without sweets!” Some sweet tooth exclaim and, oddly enough, there is not much exaggeration in their words. Sugar can indeed become the cause of the strongest chemical dependence. Moreover, it is explained not only by psychological aspects, but also by the chemical and biological characteristics of the human body.
The fact is that sugar causes the release of insulin into the blood, while a person experiences a feeling close to euphoria. However, the feeling of pleasure and satiety quickly passes, and again you want more. Sweets are addictive to serotonin and dopamine, which are produced by the body when they are consumed. It is these two hormones that improve mood. And the more often a person eats desserts, the greater his dependence on the state of happiness caused by these hormones.
By the way, experiments on rats have shown that the changes in the brain produced by sugar are very similar to those that occur under the influence of cocaine, morphine or nicotine.
Sugar can be good
So, it is a powerful antiseptic. Sugar kills microbes, promotes wound healing, destroys pathogens. For example, if you make a bandage with sugar on the wound, then the sore spot will be protected not only from bacteria, but also from the appearance of excessive moisture. And healing will be faster.
Sugar can be used for more than just food
Sugar doesn't have to be in coffee or baked goods. It is useful in the household and for completely non-food purposes. For example, it has long established itself as an excellent top dressing for indoor plants. To prepare a nutrient solution, you need to dilute 1 tbsp. a spoonful of sugar in 0.5 liters of water. They should be watered no more than once a month. You can do it even easier - sprinkle sugar on the ground in a flower pot, and then water it.
Difficult-to-remove "greasy" stains on clothes are easily removed with sugar and soap. To do this, you need to hold the place of contamination under a stream of hot water, and then lather it well with a piece of laundry soap - until a large amount of foam forms on the surface of the fabric. Then we rub it with our hands, and after a while we pour about a teaspoon of sugar on top. Three, as in washing, only without water. Then leave the thing alone for 10-15 minutes, rinse well with water.
You can also get rid of an unpleasant smell in an old coffee grinder, jars for spices with sugar. It is enough just to pour granulated sugar into the container, leave for half an hour, and then rinse well under running water - it will perfectly absorb all unpleasant odors.
By the way, sugar is also used in the bottom antiamphibious mine, which is installed at the bottom of the reservoir. In the device, the fuse is made of pressed sugar. Having installed such a mine, they open the lid, which closed the water access to the cork. After a couple of hours, the sugar cork will dissolve, and the weapon will be cocked, this eliminates the danger of being blown up during installation.
Sugar is also used in the manufacture of plastics, leather dressing, pharmaceutical, tobacco and other non-food industries.
Monuments dedicated to the Sahara
Monument to refined sugar. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
The first monument to sugar was erected in 2003 in the Czech Republic (Dacica city).
The monument was opened in honor of the 160th anniversary of the invention of refined sugar. It was in this country that a method was invented for pressing sweet powder into convenient cubes; this was done by the manager of the sugar factory in Dačice, the Swiss Jacob Christoph Rad in 1843. He also received a patent with a license for the production of lump sugar.
The monument is installed on the site where the sugar factory used to be and is a snow-white, shiny cube with polished edges placed on a pedestal made of gray granite, symbolizing refined sugar.
A similar monument appeared in 2009 in Moscow. It was installed on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Danilovsky Sugar Refinery. The monument is located in the park on the territory of the Krasnopresnensky Sugar Refinery.
Sugar substitutes are far from harmless
Often people, refusing sugar for reasons of a healthy lifestyle, begin to lean on its substitutes. This often leads to problems too. Some of them, such as saccharin, contain carcinogenic substances, and can also exacerbate gallstone disease.
Popular aspartame has no thermal stability and in hot weather breaks down into carcinogenic formaldehyde, methanol and toxic phenylalanine. At the slightest excess of the dose causes dizziness, nausea, indigestion, allergies, insomnia. It also increases appetite.
Suclamate can cause allergic skin diseases, and xylitol can provoke the development of bladder cancer. So, experts advise, it is better to eat more fruits that contain fructose. Useful and honey. And if you really want a dessert based on sugar - eat it to your health! In reasonable amounts, it won't hurt you.
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What diseases does sugar cause?
Why do we have so many obese people who suffer from serious illnesses, including diabetes?
According to statistics, 40℅ people on the globe have this disease, and the number of such patients is growing exponentially.
Russia is in 4th place in terms of the number of patients with diabetes and obesity. This is especially dangerous for children who have been accustomed to sweets since childhood and have completely lost all metabolic processes in the body.
A terrifying figure: 42 million preschoolers in Russia are already obese! And every Russian on average consumes 40 kg of sugar per year, that is, 1 kg per week (that's 15 teaspoons per day)!
In America, for example, sugar consumption has tripled and the American Heart Association has recommended strict consumption rates: for women - 6 teaspoons a day, for men - 9.
In the 20th century, Dr. William Martin generally called sugar "sweet poison", it is a dead product that leads to serious diseases and shortens human life.
And the British psychologist and nutritionist John Yutkin in 1970 published the book Pure, White, Deadly, in which he predicted an epidemic of obesity and coronary heart disease due to an increase in the amount of sugar in human food.
He emphasizes that sugar is processed in the liver in the same way as alcohol and causes 8 serious problems, such as high blood pressure, liver dysfunction, high cholesterol, heart disease, obesity, pancreatitis, diabetes and addiction as with alcohol and drug addiction. , which was called "sugarism".
How Sugar Addiction Becomes
And the scheme here is this: sugar is a fast carbohydrate, it is immediately absorbed into the bloodstream and the glucose level rises rapidly, BUT!
The trap is that after a certain period of time this level decreases and attacks of hunger attack the person again and again.
It's like a vicious circle: the body is addicted to sweets, it requires more and more portions of sugar. This is called "sugar swing".
Princeton University scientists have proven: our body considers sugary foods to be a drug, like cocaine, but sugar addiction grows 8 times faster than cocaine! And although official medicine does not recognize that sugar is a real drug, in reality it is.
Sugar ranks first in the ranking of popular products. Yes, it is necessary for our body as a source of energy - this is its main purpose. Its glycemic index is very high - 399 kcal per 100 g of product, which makes it unhealthy.
Composition of sugar:
- Proteins - 0 g;
- Fats - 0 g;
- Carbohydrates - 99.8 g;
- Water - 0.1 g.
Eight facts about the dangers of sugar
First:
Sugar tends to weaken the human skeletal system, easily washing out calcium from the body, which increases the risk of fractures (osteoporosis). The fact is that for the absorption of sugar, the human body spends a large amount of calcium from human bones. Tooth enamel also deteriorates and caries develops, and it is sugar that is to blame. Getting into oral cavity, produced high level acid, which adversely affects the condition of the teeth.
Second:
Sugar leads to obesity, as already mentioned, it causes a false feeling of hunger, a person overeats and gains overweight. This is due to the fact that the cells are fully occupied with the processing of carbohydrates, and fats no longer have time to process, they remain, accumulating in the body.
Third:
Sugar leads to malfunctions in the cardiovascular system: muscular dystrophy of the heart occurs, the walls of blood vessels become inflamed, blood clots form, which at any time can block blood vessels, which is directly related to strokes and heart attacks.
Fourth:
Sugar is considered a “stress food”: after the production of serotonin, the hormone of joy, the mood and tone temporarily rise. nervous system, breathing quickens (the key word is temporary) and, as a paradox, the reverse process starts: this is followed by depression, chronic fatigue, dizziness appears, vision and sleep deteriorate, a state of internal tension and devastation appears.
Fifth:
Sugar reduces immunity by 17 times. When sugar builds up in the body in large numbers, the immune system fails, metabolism is disturbed, internal organs work for wear and tear, a person often gets sick.
Sixth:
The skin of those with a sweet tooth ages catastrophically due to the fact that sugar is deposited in collagen fibers (this is the basis of skin tissue) in reserve and the skin quickly loses its elasticity and wrinkles ahead of time.
Seventh:
Recent studies have shown a scary thing: Cancer cells feed on sugar! And this was proved by the German scientist Otto Warburg, who was awarded Nobel Prize in the field of medicine in 1933. With the help of sugar, cells mutate and glucose is directly related to the development of cancerous tumors. Sugar and white bread are the fuel that spurs the growth of cancer cells. In addition: the more insulin in the blood, the weaker the effect of chemotherapy on the patient.
All this confirms once again how dangerous sugar is to health.
One of the articles publishes catastrophic data on sugar - these are 76 serious blows to human health. Our ancestors did not know sugar, and we began to consume sugar 40 times more than they do.
The well-known nutritionist Aleksey Kovalkov wrote: Until this millennium, people did not know what sugar was and he lived well, great thinkers, philosophers, commanders were born - all this was without sugar.
It was sugar that changed the course of history - sugar created America, where slaves were brought in droves to grow sugar cane. Remember Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Now the American sugar-hater R. Lastig proves that we all have an overdose of sugar: 80% of products in supermarkets contain sugar.
The food industry is thriving: it loves sugar, because it is the easiest and cheapest preservative - it increases the shelf life of products. In addition, it has a strong addictive effect (stronger than heroin), and in combination with fat (doughnuts, ice cream) it kills us.
Think about it and take care of your health.
- The main sources of sugar are sugar cane and sugar beets.
- Sugar cane stalks can reach a height of 9 meters.
- In ancient times, one of the provinces of India, Bengal, was called the "Land of Sugar".
- Chemical formula sugar C12H22O11.
- He first described sugar in 327 BC. e. Greek historian Onesikrit, who accompanied Alexander the Great on his Indian campaign: "In India, reeds give honey without bees."
- When Alexander the Great brought cane sugar from his Indian campaigns to Greece, he was immediately nicknamed "Indian salt".
- Christopher Columbus brought sugar to the New World in 1493 during his second voyage.
- When the cultivation of sugar cane in the New World began to bring tangible income, these territories acquired the status of real gold mines. So in 1674, Holland gave New York (formerly New Amsterdam) to England for cane plantations in Suriname, and in 1763, France bargained with Britain to return Guadeloupe, in exchange offering to take all of Canada.
- Up until the late 1700s, when sugar was considered a luxury, it was referred to as "white gold".
- From 1701 to 1810, about a million slaves from Africa were brought to Jamaica and Barbados alone to work on the sugarcane plantations.
- The world's first sugar beet factory was built by the German Achard in Kunern (Lower Silesia, now the territory of Poland) in 1801 at the direction of the king, who allocated the necessary funds in 1800.
- In Russia, the first document related to the development of its own sugar production is the decree of Peter I, signed by him on March 14, 1718. In particular, it contained instructions “to the Moscow merchant Pavel Vestov in Moscow to start a sugar factory with his own money and to invite him to that campaign, whomever he wants, for which and give him a privilege from the Manufactory Board for ten years and for this factory to export him from over the seas raw sugar, and in Moscow from that boil head sugar and sell freely.
- The first plant for the production of sugar from sugar beets (beet sugar-alcohol plant) in Russia began operating in November 1802 in the village of Alyabyevo, Chernsky district, Tula province.
- Refined sugar in the form of cubes was invented in 1843 in the Czech Republic. Its inventor was the Swiss Jacob Christoph Rad, the manager of a sugar factory in Dačice, Czech Republic.
- Refined sugar (cube 1cm) completely dissolves in a glass of 60 °C water within 11-24 seconds without stirring the water.
- It is believed that Benjamin Eisenstadt (1906-1996), the owner of a New York coffee shop, invented sugar bags to somehow optimize the use of sugar at the tables. However, not having time to patent the invention, he shared his idea with manufacturing companies that immediately seized on this idea. True, people use bags of sugar not at all the way the inventor intended.
- Sugar is a natural preservative that prevents food spoilage, and besides, it is widely used in industry and not only food.
- In some countries (India and Brazil), cars are filled with fuel obtained from sugar beets.
- Some fruits can produce their own sugar, for example, in ripe bananas, sugar is formed from the breakdown of starch, making bananas sweeter.
- Sugar is important source carbohydrates, the main source of energy for the human body.
- Lemon contains more sugar than strawberries.
- In 1747, the German chemist Markgraf discovered that the sugar in sugar beet was identical to that in sugar cane.
- The amount of sugar in 500 ml of Coca-Cola is equivalent to 16 sugar cubes.
- Artificial sweeteners - aspartame (E951) and saccharin - were obtained by accident. The first in the process of oxidation of 2-toluenesulfonamide, and the second - in the course of experiments to obtain a cure for ulcers.
- The strongest sugar substitute, lugduname, is almost 300,000 times sweeter than sugar.
- One type of sugar, glycolaldehyde, has been found in interstellar dust billions of kilometers from our planet.
- Model rocket scientists use a mixture of glucose, corn syrup, and saltpeter as rocket fuel.
- In the USA, an interesting medicine is produced in tablets called Obecalp (a placebo, if you read its name backwards), the main component of which is sugar, such tablets are prescribed to children with minor health complaints.
- By the way, initially in Europe, sugar was considered a medicine and was sold in pharmacies.
- Eating too much sugar can lead to wrinkles due to the fact that sugar is deposited in the skin's collagen, making it less elastic.
- On May 13, 1920, at a conference of dentists in Manchester, sucrose was named for the first time. main reason dental disease causing caries.
- More than 110 million tons of sugar are produced annually: 60% from sugar cane and 40% from sugar beets.
- The world's largest sugar beet processing plant is located in France.
- According to the International Sugar Organization, sugar production in 2012 will exceed demand by 5.9 million tons.
- The main sugar producers are Brazil, India, the European Union, China and Thailand.
- Brazil is the largest exporter of sugar.
- The highest per capita consumption of sugar is in Brazil.
- The largest importers of sugar are the European Union, the United States and Indonesia.
- Yellow sugar is considered much healthier than white sugar. It absorbs faster and is considered an elite strain in the US and Japan.
- Over the past 20 years, human consumption of sugar has increased to 40 kilograms per year, it is part of most foods (bread, butter, condiments, sauces, etc.).
- Experts believe that a healthy dose of sugar per day for a woman can contain up to 100 kcal, or about 4 teaspoons of sugar, and for a man, 150 kcal, or about 6 teaspoons of sugar. And for a child - 1 teaspoon. This amount includes all sugars consumed, including those found in confectionery and sweetened foods and drinks.
03.01.2012
Interesting unknown facts about sugar:
1. The average American eats 61 pounds Sahara per year, of which 25 pounds in sweets. On Halloween, 2 pounds are eaten.
2. Because of Sahara wrinkles can form during glycation when elevated level Sahara in the blood, it binds to collagen in the skin, making it less elastic.
3. Reduce consumption Sahara can help the skin regain elasticity.
4. Made in India sugar from reed for 2000 years. Alexander the Great and his army marveled at the production of honey without Sahara.
5. In 1747, the German chemist Andreas Markgraf discovered that sugar in sugar beet is identical sugar in sugar cane. In 1802, the first factory for the production of Sahara from beets, which made it possible to supply cheap sugar to the northern regions.
6. Over 8.4 million metric tons Sahara, produced annually in the United States, is obtained from sugar beets.
7. You can eat 16 cubes Sahara at once? You must have done it. That's a little less than a 20-ounce bottle of cola.
8. Drinks with artificial sweeteners help you gain weight. The study determined that rats that consumed liquid with artificial sweeteners received more calories than rats that consumed liquid with no sweeteners. Sahara.
9. Saccharin and aspartame were created by chance when scientists were doing research unrelated to sweeteners, tasting a test sample and they liked the taste.
10. Which scientist puts test samples in his mouth? They had an excuse. The scientists who discovered sucralose were trying to create an insect repellent. The assistant thought he was being asked to sample the sample, not to test it.
11. The substance lugdunam is the sweetest, 200,000 times sweeter than table Sahara.
12. Sugar are molecules of carbohydrates, hydrogen and oxygen. The simplest include glucose, fructose and galactose. Canteen sugar is a crystallized sucrose, a mixture of fructose and glucose molecules.
13. Sugars are the building blocks of carbohydrates, the largest type of organic molecules in living things.
14. Glycolaldehyde - an eight-atom sugar, was discovered in a cloud of interstellar gas near the center Milky Way. Glycolaldehyde can react with tricarboxylic sugar and form ribose, the backbone of RNA and DNA, so that it could be the chemical precursor of life on Earth.
This cloud also contains ethylene glycol, the sweet relative of glycolaldehyde and the main ingredient in antifreeze. Either complex sugars can be produced in interstellar space, or there is some point in the universe for their production. Sugar can help determine this. Burn sucrose with corn syrup and saltpeter and you've got "sugar fuel," amateur rocket fuel.
Gulnara based on Discovermagazine materials