Bread and sugar are the same kind of molecule. One is simply a long chain of the other.

What it means

Starch is a polymer of glucose units linked end to end, and digestion breaks those links to release the sugar. That is why a piece of plain bread turns sweet if you hold it in your mouth long enough for the enzymes in saliva to get to work. The difference between a simple and a complex carbohydrate is how long the chain is and therefore how quickly the sugar arrives.

The claim comes from MedlinePlus, and the page it comes from was read on 2026-08-27 to confirm it still says this.

This is not the kind of claim that goes out of date, which is why it was set as a puzzle rather than a fact with a shelf life.

Solve it yourself

This fact is a cryptogram here: 68 letters over 20 different ones, graded medium.

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Nearby in the collection

The facts either side of this one.

• NCBI Bookshelfmedium, 77 letters
• MedlinePlusmedium, 69 letters
• Frontiers in Psychologymedium, 68 letters
• PNASmedium, 72 letters

About as hard as this one

Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.

• NIDCDmedium, 68 letters
• NCBI Bookshelfmedium, 79 letters
• National Human Genome Research Institutemedium, 74 letters
• National Eye Institutemedium, 72 letters