Carbohydrates are delicious. No questions asked and no other answers accepted. I challenge you to find someone who doesn't think they're amazing and isn't a fucking liar because if they say carbs aren't angels in food form they're liars. Carbs get their name from the fact that they're made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. When you combine hydrogen and oxygen, you get water and in science, we said the fancy word for water is hydro. So carbohyrdrate means carbon and water and any carbohydrate can be abbreviated by the formula (CH2O)n where n is a whole number. The most famous carbohydrate is glucose, which has a formula of C6H12O6 and is so fucking important it's stupid. Trust me, you will have that one memorized if you read this whole book. Glucose is definitely a monomer of the more complex carbohydrates (more on those in a few paragraphs) and being simpler in nature, glucose is known as a monosaccharide, essentially meaning one sugar. It’s what our bodies and the bodies of just about everything out there uses for energy on a daily basis. That’s why diabetes is so fucked up, it messes with your ability to essentially keep yourself energized. The sugar found in the infamous high fructose corn syrup is also a monosaccharide and when you hook fructose and glucose together (both being monosaccharides) you end up with the disaccharide sucrose, which is what you think of when you think of sugar. The white, crystally stuff found in pantries and that you put in coffee, that’s sucrose.
Once we start linking a shit ton of monosaccharides together, we end up with polysaccharides. Hopefully by now you’ve picked up on the fact that the word saccharide alludes to sugar but there’s another big name-based giveaway, something you’ll want to remember, that a compound is a sugar. So far we’ve discussed glucose, fructose, and sucrose, all three ending with the same three letters. That ending, -ose, is typically a dead giveaway that you’re talking about a sugar. (Side note: don’t be that fucker that says “nose” isn’t a sugar because that has ACTUALLY happened to me and it was so fucking annoying.) Polysaccharides can go by a bunch of different names because they can be countless different things but what we’re going to focus on are three major polysaccharides that are all formed by the same monomer -- glucose (told you it was fucking important). Starch, glycogen, and cellulose (there’s the -ose) are all polymers made of the exact same monomer, glucose, just arranged in different ways. Starch is made of thousands and thousands of glucose molecules strung together and serves as the main way plants store excess sugar. That’s why starchy foods like breads and grains are so full of energy and is the same reason low-carb diets work as long as you stick with them but fail the instant you start eating carbs again. Very similar to starch is glycogen, which is also made of thousands of glucose monomers except they are arranged in a slightly different manner than they are in starch. Glycogen is the animal form of starch and is basically the middle step between food that is eaten and fat being formed. Lastly is cellulose, which is also a bunch of glucose molecules stuck together in yet another different way and are arranged such that it is extremely difficult to separate the individual monomers from each other. Because of this, cellulose is less of an energy-storing carbohydrate and instead is a structural carbohydrate, being a major component of the cell wall of plants.
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