Nutrition Science and Everyday Application - beta v 0.1

Types of Carbohydrates
On this page, we’ll get acquainted with the chemical structure of different types of
carbohydrates and learn where we find them in foods.
First, all carbohydrates are made up of the same chemical elements:
• carbon (that’s the “carbo-” part)
• hydrogen and oxygen, in about a two-to-one proportion, just like in H 2 O (that’s the
“-hydrate” part)
For this reason, you may see carbohydrates abbreviated as “CHO” in our class.
Carbohydrates can be divided into two main types: simple and complex. Simple
carbohydrates are made up of just one or two sugar units, whereas complex carbohydrates
are made up of many sugar units. We’ll look at each of these in turn. This figure gives you an
overview of the types of carbohydrates that we’ll cover.
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