Introduction

The status of sugar has shifted markedly as scientists and health professionals review its role in health and nutrition. As a member of the carbohydrate family, sugar is a safe and natural source of good quality energy - and it makes food enjoyable to eat.

Sugar also makes a unique contribution to the way food looks, tastes and lasts on the shelf. Sugar has now won consumer acceptance for its place in a healthy balanced diet, after being incorrectly linked to certain health difficulties of the decades.

Sugar has a long history. Man's early experience while foraging for food was that sweet foods were more likely to be safe to eat, bitter ones were either poisonous or dangerous. That was nature’s guide to food safety - a protective mechanism that still applies today.

Sugar is also the basic fuel for both plants and animals - a building block for all life. Our bodies are unable to tell the difference between the sugars found naturally in vegetables, fruit and cereals, and the same sugars put into food by manufacturers. Sucrose (sugar) is broken down by digestion into glucose and fructose (both sugars), and these break down into carbon dioxide and water and the energy we need.

In the form of glucose, sugar is carried by the blood to all the cells of our bodies. Sucrose is the substance that plants manufacture from air and water - and the minerals in the soil - using the energy of the sun. Under that process, called photosynthesis, sugar is produced and this is the fuel that plants use to live and grow.