When we think about carbs we often picture them in simplistic terms.
We either think of them as 'good' or 'bad', perhaps even starchy or non-starchy.
We might imagine a bowl of pasta, a bowl of rice, or even veggies or fruit.
Either way, few of us think of them in terms of their chemical contents.
The reality however is that all carbs can be broken down into three different groups, each distinguished by their sugar content.
One of the primary groups are the monosaccharides, and these are commonly encountered just about everywhere.
In today's article we're going to take a look at them, and explain what it is that makes them so different from the others.
Monosaccharides on their simplest level can be understood as single sugar molecules.
Take a look at the name: mono means single, while saccharides means sugar.
There are three primary kinds of monosaccharides, and those are glucose, sucrose, and galactose.
Glucose is commonly known as 'blood sugar', while fructose is fruit sugar, and galactose is quite simply milk sugar.
There is a fourth kind of monosaccharide known as dextrose, but that's simply a variation on glucose, and in fact both are mirror images of each other.
Glucose can be found in some fruits or in artificially made candy, but most often it is found in the bloodstream of human beings.
When diabetics talk about their blood sugar levels they are discussing the amount of glucose they have, and how they can best control it.
All carbohydrates are eventually converted into glucose by our digestive systems.
Fructose is turned into glucose in this manner.
Found in fruits (hence the name), fructose is always converted into glucose before being released into the blood stream.
Sometimes it may be stored as glycogen in the liver before this happens, but you almost never find fructose floating in human blood in its natural state.
Galactose and fructose are rarely consumed in sufficient quantities to concern anybody who is watching their diets.
You would have to consume about seven pieces of fruit to cross the threshold at which point your liver might begin converting it into fat, and galactose is rarely consumed in such amounts either.
The only place where these sugars become a problem is when you consume lots of soda and other sugary sweets that have unnaturally high amounts of fructose in them.
This can quickly overload your system, and cause you to begin creating fat.