AgDaily
Sugar is certainly a staple in lots of our favorite treats — sodas, candy, baked goods, just to name a few. Despite it being so common, many people don’t seem to know much about how sugar is created. It’s an interesting process going from a plant to the sweet, white crystals that we put in our food.
The chemical name for the sugar we know and love is sucrose. Sucrose is naturally produced by plants during the process of photosynthesis. While all plants have sucrose, two have the most, making them the best choices to extract the sucrose from to turn into sugar. Those plants are sugar beets and sugar cane. To make sugar, the simple version of the process is to grow the plants, harvest them, and extract the sugar. This means that the sugar we use is exactly the same thing that is naturally found in fruits and vegetables. Our bodies process it the same because it is the same thing.