I suspect that labelling of sugar content only refers to the glucose, fructose and sucrose contents of honey. There are at least 12 disaccharides in honey in addition to fructose and glucose – sucrose, maltose, isomaltose, nigerose, turanose, maltulose, leucrose, kojibiose, neotrehalase, gentiobiose, laminaribiose and isomaltulose. My guess is this is where the extra carbs are from.
Here’s an interesting story about someone who went without artificial light for a month and fell into a bimodal sleep pattern
Friday I felt really drained, even though I’d had a reasonable amount of sleep and eaten as much as I wanted of low glycemic and fairly high-fat food.
Towards the end of the day I had a piece of Texas sheet cake (white flour, sugar, Crisco, and applesauce). The world snapped into focus, and a friend said it was the first time she’d seen my eyes open all day.
RE: Evolution and sugar. Glucose can provide a temporary substitute for rest in that it can help restore executive functioning for people that are cognitively fatigued. Since hunting can be a high vigilance activity, and therefore one that can fatigue executive functioning this suggests one possibility.
Either way, our taste for sweetness must serve some evolutionary purpsose in terms of the doses someone woudl get from fruit and honey ingestion
Chuck Says: In Honey’s Unknown Benefits By Lindsey Duncan, he states…” The natural sugar found in honey raises our insulin slightly and allows tryptophan, the compound famous for making us sleepy after eating turkey at Thanksgiving, to enter our brains more easily.”
Chuck, supposedly insulin pushes tryptophan into the brain, which becomes serotinin which becomes melatonin and melatonin moderates insulin which is why eating sugar before bed doesn’t cause blood sugar swings or fat gain. Melatonin also helps with HGH pulsing which is beneficial.
All sweetness in nature, honey and fruit, contain fructose
However, i don’t understand the idea of “natural sugar.” Honey is a mixture of glucose and fructose. Sucrose is a mixture of glucose and sucrose. The only difference is that while the two monosaccarides are in free form in honey, sucrose holds the fructose and glucose together with a glycosidic bond which is quickly broken during digestion. Does anyone know if “natural sugar” and sucrose are really that different in terms of how the body metabolizes them? (I do realize that honey has several other benefical compounds. I’m specifically refering to the “natural sugar” argument.)
As to why we prefer sweet foods, my guess is that it has to do with proper liver uptake of glucose, since fructose plays a role in activating glucokinase which is involved in glycogen synthesis. It’s very difficult to overeat on those foods. I think drinking a 24 oz Mountain Dew perverts our inborn taste for sweetness matchocean.
Not dessert as in sweet foods, but as in the specific course eaten after dinner. It doesn’t exist. Guyanese people eat dinner and then that’s it. I remember going to my American friend’s house and being shocked that people in real life actually ate dessert.
Seth: Dessert is rare in China, where I live much of the year. But the Chinese people near me eat lots of sweets, especially at night. I see this any evening I walk down the street.
Eric, my only issue with your link to the research on glucose is that it doesn’t explain why we enjoy things that are sweet. Starch is pure glucose and yet its not sweet. Potatoes taste great, but are not sweet. Actually, potoates only taste good with either adding fat or sugar.