Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast

episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're discussing sugar. It's well known that too much sugar can have a negative impact on your health.

But for those of us with a sweet tooth, could swapping in natural sugar alternatives like honey be a healthier way of getting that sweet taste?

Or are we jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire?

Here to explain the science of sugar is Professor Sarah Berry.

There's a perception that natural sugar alternatives like honey are healthier than table sugar because they're less processed and because simply they're considered to be more natural.

And a question I hit really frequently is if I use honey or maple syrup or

any of these other natural sugar alternatives in my cooking or my baking

doesn't mean it's healthier. So before we talk about those alternatives can we actually

maybe start with the beginning of that question which is isn't table sugar itself natural?

Well it depends what you term natural. Yes, it's made from sugar cane, which is a plant and

once the cane is harvested it's crushed to extract its juice

then the sugar cane juice is boiled until the water evaporates leaving behind

these sugar crystals. Could you just explain a bit how exactly natural sugar alternatives are different from table sugar and explain a bit what's going on there?

Yeah, so let's first look at what table sugar is.

So table sugar is sucrose, and this is a dye saccharide,

which means it's made up of two sugars bound together.

Hence where the word dye saccharide comes from dye meaning

two and saccharide meaning sugar. And the two sugars that are bound together in sucrose are glucose fructoseose. So our natural alternatives to sugar

also made up of glucose and fructose stuck together to make sucrose?

Yeah, so typically most natural alternatives to sugar are made up of fructoseose and glucose.

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