BITTER SUGAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 84, 6 October 1938, Page 12

BITTER SUGAR

ONE OF MANY EXISTING

TYPES

All that is sugar is not sweet, says tfie "New York Times." Some sugars 'are bitter, others are poisonous. Besides the kind of sweet crystals iri your sugar bowl, there are literally hundreds of substances chemists know as •sugars. Some, like the common sugar, are cheap. Others are very expensive. Nor is purity, in the case of sugars, a matter of cost. Sucrose obtained from the sugar cane or sugar beet is highly purified, and it is one of the cheapest substances in the grocery store. An industrial bulletin points 'out thai a crude sucrose, obtained from 'maple trees, is relatively expensive and "furnishes a classic exaimple of how value may depend almost entirely upon the presence of impurities, which ia this case impart the distinctive maple flavour that gives this sugar its favoured place in commerce. Dextrose and lactose are two other extensively used food sugars. Also known as glucose, dextrose is produced from the starch of corn and is sold as the major part (50 per cent.) of corn syrup and as dry white crystalline materials. There crystal-, at abcpt 4 cents per pound are perhaps the cheapest organic material produced. Lactose is milk sugar. Babies can digest it at birth. Heat caramelises it to produce that attractive golden-brown colour of biscuits,"bread,

and pie-crust. Sugars are one of the important raw materials for chemical manufacture, Vast quantities of molasses are- the | starting point for producing alcohol, citric acid, yeast, and other products. Dextrose is fermented on a large scale to produce chemicals and is reducejti by electrolytic means to give rise to the sugar-alcohols, mannitol and sorbitol, which are new to commerce. One of the so-called rare sugars, trehalose or mycose, found in fungi and ' in the manna of Persia, is possibly 1 the most chemically stable of all sugars, resisting the combined actio* of alkalies and oxidising agentt.