White Sugar

Food · Pantry & Condiment · Food, Typed Supps

Pure sucrose. No micronutrients at all — this is the reference point.

Stage by stage

Intake (Oral cavity): Oral bacteria ferment sucrose to acid, which is why exposure frequency drives caries risk more than total amount.
Hydrolysis (Brush border): Sucrase-isomaltase splits sucrose into glucose and fructose; neither can be absorbed while bonded.
Glucose route (Systemic circulation): The glucose half enters the bloodstream and triggers the insulin response.
Fructose route (Liver): The fructose half is metabolised almost entirely in the liver, escaping the regulation that governs glucose.

Timing

Eaten with fibre, fat or protein, the glycaemic rise is blunted. Alone or in liquid form it is fastest — useful around hard training, unhelpful otherwise.

Time to effect

Minutes: Blood glucose rises almost immediately.
Years: Caries and metabolic risk accrue with habitual intake, not with any single exposure.

Allergens

None of the fourteen major allergens. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.

Eating patterns

Fits: Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher, Gluten-free. Depends on the product: Vegan, Low-FODMAP.

Environmental footprint

3.2 kg CO2e and 202 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Cane sugar" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.

Cost band

Cheap — roughly £1.5 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.

Key nutrients

Sucrose

Nutrition per 100g

Calories: 382
Carbohydrate: 100g
of which sugars: 100g

Food vs. supplement

The sugar in an orange and the sugar in a spoonful are the same molecules; the fibre, water and cell structure around them are not, and that changes absorption rate enough for guidelines to treat them separately.

Kitchen tip

Brown, raw and demerara sugar are sucrose with residual molasses — treat them as identical to white for dietary purposes.

Common myth

“Brown and raw sugar are healthier than white.” In reality: They are sucrose with a little residual molasses. The extra minerals are measurable and nutritionally meaningless — you would need an implausible quantity for them to contribute anything, and the sugar would vastly outweigh it.