Technical Information

Nutritional Value of Pure Maple Syrup

Pure maple syrup is a "natural" food, processed by heat concentration of pure maple sap, which is the liquid nutrient utilized by trees for their annual tissue growth and collected early in the spring when trees are going through their dormant stage.

During the boiling, concentration and filtering processes, the nutrients remain in the syrup. Despite a slight difference in the maple syrup composition, depending on the producer, environmental factors and processing methods, pure maple syrup contain most needed essential nutrients for humans.

Maple syrup's main nutrients would include organic acids, minerals, phenoliccompounds, vitamins, amino compounds and sugars. Without altering its natural composition, maple syrup has the following nutritional information per 50 ml servings:

Sugars

Carbohydrates are the body's main source of fuel whenever needed. They are mostly composed of simple sugars, which are sweet in taste and broken down quickly in the body to release its energy. Glucose (primary sugar stored in our body) and fructose are the most familiar components of simple sugars and in pure maple syrup, they are found together as sucrose; a mixture of glucose and fructose at a 1:1 ratio in fancy grades of syrup (AAA, AA, A). The darker grades (B, C, D, and NC) will have a variable concentration of glucose and fructose at different ratios depending on the grade.

Dosage of invert sugar in maple syrup

Minerals

Minerals serve a good purpose in human bodies; their continued supply in a diet is needed for growth in children, maintenance of body weight in adulthood and for reproduction. They also play a vital role in the metabolism process of your system. Maple syrup contains on average about 35 mg/tbsp of potassium and 21 mg/tbsp of calcium mainly. The rest are small amounts of iron, phosphorus, manganese and magnesium. The following table illustrates the percentage of daily intake 50 ml of maple syrup represents in terms of primary minerals and vitamins.

Vitamins

Vitamins play vital roles in terms of our bodies functioning correctly and fortunately enough; pure maple syrup contains some of these important vitamins. They are found in trace amounts and are mainly B2 (riboflavin), B5 (pantothenic acid), B6 (pyridoxine), PP (niacin), folic acid and vitamin A. While most of them contribute to facilitating energy production and to the metabolism of cells in our bodies (PP, B5 and B2) others play a role in protein and amino acid metabolism by transferring amino acids from one cell to another when needed (B6). Vitamin A is also contained in pure maple syrup and is beneficial to our vision, skin and immune system.

Amino Acids

Amino acids are major role players as building blocks for proteins and as intermediates in metabolism. Out of the 20 amino acids found within proteins 10 are produced by our body. The others must be supplied within our daily food intake otherwise the lack of just one of the 10 essential amino acids, of which we cannot produce, will cause degradation of the body's protein mass - muscle and so forth - to compensate for the need. It's important that amino acids are part of our daily diet as they're not kept in storage by our body like fat and starch.