Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Happy holidays everyone!

I was wondering what sugars can be found in tomatoes. I was also wondering how I should go about measuring them. Would a blood sugar level indicator work, or is that a different kind of sugar???

Thanks,

-Lee

Hi Lee,

The type of sugar that a blood sugar level indicator measures is the simple sugar glucose. Simple sugars are the smallest units of carbohydrates, they are also called monosaccharides. Glucose is a building block of some other disaccharide sugars like sucrose (disaccharide means 2 monosaccharide sugar units joined together) and more complex carbohydrates, which may have many monosaccharides joined together.

Try searching glucose on wikipedia to find more information. Another simple sugar found in a lot of fruits and vegetables is fructose. Galactose is another simple sugar that is part of the sugar lactose found in milk. Try searching monosaccharides to find names and information on other simple sugars. Then you could try combination searches on google with the different sugar names in combination with the word tomato and see what comes up.

I have no idea if a blood glucose monitor can measure glucose from other sources but it would be an interesting experiment to try.

Best of luck and happy holidays to you too,
Caroline