They are the ingredients for life, and we call them the carbohydrates, the lipids, the proteins, and the nucleic acids.
Carbohydrates are made up of sugars, and the simplest of them are called monosaccharides. "Mono" for one, "saccharides" for the actual root of the word sugar. The star of the show here is glucose, because it’s truly fundamental, by which I mean, like, number one on the global food chain, because it comes from the sun.
His name was William Prout, and in the early 1800s, he became fascinated with human digestion, especially our urine. And that’s because he thought that the best way to understand the human body was through chemistry, and the best way to understand the body's chemistry was to understand what it does to food.
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to digest. Cows can do it, but humans certainly can not, which is why you don' t enjoy eating grass.