View all slides | Contents of this slide

Lecture Notes

Our second macronutrient, which is also an essential nutrient, are carbohydrates. And the major function of carbohydrates is to be an energy source for the body.

And oftentimes carbohydrates get a bad rap when people talk in the popular media about diet, but as you'll see, carbohydrates play a very important role in our body, and namely they're that preferred energy source. They have the same calories per gram as proteins, and they're classified into two different types: simple and complex.

And the simple carbohydrates are mono and disaccharides. Saccharide simply means sugar, or sweet. So, simple carbohydrates just have one or two sugar molecules, and complex carbohydrates have three or more sugar molecules, and those are called polysaccharides.

So, examples of monosaccharides are glucose (or your blood sugar) and fructose (the sugar that's found in fruit).

Examples of disaccharides would be sucrose (or your table sugar), lactose (which is milk sugar). And so for lactose, for example, you have the combination of glucose and galactose together, and so you have two different sugar molecules that are working together.

Your complex carbohydrates you're going to have things that people often associate with being carbohydrates such as your starches and your fibers.