What is sugar?

Let's get some definitions out of the way so we can have a better conversation about sugar.

What do you mean by "sugar"?

Sugar as we typically think about it has many different names:
Sugar
Evaporated cane juice
Beet sugar
Cane sugar
Brown sugar
Honey
Agave nectar
Barley malt
Molasses
Brown rice syrup
Corn syrup
High-fructose corn syrup (AKA, "the devil")
And on and on.

These are what I will call "added sugars". They're extracted from some source (agave, corn, beets, barley, sugar cane, honeycomb, etc.) and added to foods they don't exist in naturally.

Added sugars are bad news. Food companies put them into our foods because they know they are addictive and can get us to buy more of their foods (more on the addictive nature of sugar later).

OK, I'll get rid of all these sugars in my house. Can we be friends now?

Sorry, but no. Don't be offended; you're not alone. This is a point a lot of people don't understand.

There are also sugars that are inherently a part of the foods we eat. "Natural sugars" may be an appropriate term here. Fruits have a lot of these sugars, as do vegetables (particularly root vegetables), nuts, legumes, milk, and grains. These "natural sugars" are called "carbohydrates".

Normally, when we eat foods in their natural states (grilled vegetables, whole fruits, etc.), the natural sugars (carbohydrates) don't have much of an effect on us because their digestion is slowed down by the accompanying fiber. This is not always true -- grapes, for example are, in the words of Dr. Robert Lustig, an esteemed scientist, "just little bags of sugar" -- but it applies most of the time.

Unfortunately, much of our modern food is highly processed so that the fiber is taken out, giving our bodies "natural" sugars in very unnatural amounts.

Take the orange as an example. To get a cup of orange juice, you'd have to a) eat 2 medium-sized oranges, b) spend 5 minutes juicing 2 medium oranges, c) spend money on a juicer/blender to do the hard work for you, or d) spend even more money to pick up a carton of orange juice at the grocery store.

Show of hands: How many people have ever, in their entire lives, eaten more than 2 oranges in one sitting? How many people have had more than a glass (1 cup; 8 oz) of orange juice in one sitting? You can leave your answer in the comments if we want to get pseudo-scientific about it, but I'm going to bet that a lot more people have had more than one glass of juice in one sitting than have had more than 2 oranges in one sitting. Why is that?

The sheer volume of or is going to take up a lot more room in our stomachs than a glass of orange juice, so in eating a whole fruit, your body is going to limit you to what you consume in a much bigger way than if you ate the juice. It also takes longer to eat a couple of oranges than it does to drink their juice, giving your body time to process the sugar it has taken in.

One orange (medium sized) has about 15g of carbs with 3g coming from fiber.  One cup of orange juice has about 26g of carbs with less than 1g coming from fiber. Because our bodies can't digest fiber, we can subtract the carbs coming from fiber from the total carbs in the orange, and the same with the orange juice.

If you compare the "net carbs" for a whole orange (15g-3g=12g) to the "net carbs" for a glass of orange juice (26g-1g=25g) you find that in one cup of orange juice you get 2x the sugar you would get from eating a whole orange. Carbs that aren't fiber turn to sugar, and the less fiber that exists in a food, the faster that conversion happens.

Now apply that same principle to crackers, bread, tortillas, pasta and every other food staple in your pantry and you will see that the problem of excess sugar consumption is not solved by simply avoiding "added sugars".

When we talk about sugar in our family, we don't just use it to mean "added sugars". We use it as a synonym for "carbohydrates".