Does sucrose or lactose take longer to be converted into glucose?
Sucrose and lactose are both disaccharides; sucrose is glucose + fructose and lactose is glucose + galactose. In theory, breakdown of these molecules to the constituent monosaccharides occurs at a near-identical rate. In practice, the breakdown of lactose takes slightly longer simply because we depend on a specialized enzyme to process the galactose, and we don’t have that enzyme at a particularly high concentration. And yes, the fact that we rely on a specialized enzyme to process lactose, and the fact that this means it is broken down more slowly, is indeed a good part of the reason why diabetics can still handle dairy.
