Talk:Sweetness

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To-do list for Sweetness: edit · history · watch · refresh

Here are some tasks you can do:
  • Verify:
    • Provide inline citations throughout
    • Expand:
    • Evolutionary function of finding sweet foods pleasurable (and the optimality of the system)
    -e.g. quick supply of glucose which can be metabolized very quickly
    • Neuroscience behind sweetness perception
    • Basis of measurement of sweetness, and more on the mechanism of taste buds detecting sweetness (what are the 'sweetness detectors' and what is their chemistry?
Priority 4  

Contents

[edit] Sweetness of mirror sugars

Dextrose comes in left- and right-handed enantiomers; only the right-handed version can be metabolized. Does the left-handed version (levose?) taste sweet?

Did you mean Levulose? "... Levulose [has] a natural taste similar to that of sugar but more mellowed." from [http://diabeticsdezire.com/faq.html] Monkeyman 01:52, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that that's actually mirror-dextrose, from the description. I would expect mirror-dextrose to have zero caloric content but it might be sweet; I have no idea. --Andrew 02:14, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)

The left-handed monosaccharides are similar in taste to their natural counterparts, but cannot be metabolized. The sweetness receptor does not appear to be specific to any particular compound, but rather to recognize a broad range of compounds, so the fact that mirror saccharides are sweet is not terribly surprising. Shimmin 21:13, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
Seek out a referece for this point, as I heard it, L-glucose had no sweetness, a faint salty flavor is all. This is logical, the same failure of the L-molecule to fit in the digestive enzyme catalytic site prevents it from acting in the taste protein "pocket". I don't have a reference for this handy, but I did taste them both in high school biology
Here's your answer: "Curiously, although d- and l-glucose are spatial enantiomers, they are prosymmetric with regard to the glycophore; that is, with regard to the sweet receptor, they are effectively identical (Shallenberger 1997), leading to the potential use of l-hexose mono- (Levin 1981) and di-saccharides (Bakal 1984) as non-caloric bulk sweeteners." Quote taken from directly from http://www.springerlink.com/content/920760277g17724r/fulltext.html Jeh25 (talk) 02:41, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

class.64.252.24.88 (talk) 19:02, 24 December 2007 (UTC) Ah, that's interesting! Do you know if anyone has tried to use them as sugar replacements? If they are equally sweet but cannot be metabolized, it seems one could make a reasonable sugar replacement by inorganically synthesizing, say, fructose, then letting some bug digest all the dextrose... when you say they cannot be metabolized, what does that mean? Do they pass from the digestive tract into the bloodstream? Are they safely eliminated from the body? Presumably they cannot be used as an energy source... --Andrew 00:35, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC)

While they are presumably useful as sugar substitutes, in the US at least, no one has submitted a new drug petition to the FDA for L-glucose or any other. Their chief defect is that while they are several times more expensive than sugar, they are no sweeter than sugar. Shimmin 10:22, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] How is sweetness measured?

Could somebody explain what exactly is meant when they say that something is 2,000x as sweet as something else? Thanks! DanKeshet 05:14, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)

My understanding of sweetness, and it may be wrong, is that the sweetness of something is determined by the number of molecules that that substance takes to trigger the sweetness receptor in the taste bud. For example, let's say that it takes 10,000 molecules of substance X to trigger the sweetness receptor in tastebuds. Now let's say that it takes only 5,000 molecules of substance Y to trigger the sweetness receptor in the tastebuds. You could say that substance Y is twice as sweet as substance X. And if it only took 1 molecule of substance Z to activate the receptors, substance Z would be 10,000 times as sweet as substance X and 5,000 times as sweet substance Y.

etc... --Henrybaker 03:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Please add new comments/questions under a new heading. Thanks. Richard001 05:53, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Irrelevant material?

The intro has the following at the end of it.

In the English language, things that are pleasant in a more general sense are often called sweet, in phrases such as "sweet rest," "sweet revenge," "sweet dreams," or "home sweet home." In many other languages, both ancient and modern, the adjective meaning sweet can also be used to describe things that are in any way very good.

What does this have to do with the topic? The topic seems to be related to the sense of taste. This material is not relevant and detracts from the article. At best this material belongs in another article but, frankly, I'm not sure what that article would be able. Wikipedia, after all, is not a dictionary.

I'm going to going to remove this. If somebody has a different viewpoint, feel free to restore, rephrase, comment, or whatever.

--Mcorazao 19:42, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

It could be relevant on a section about the word's etymology. Richard001 07:00, 18 August 2007 (UTC)


Does the photograph of the girl with the lollipop really lend anything to this topic. And should it be properly captioned? (Sorry, I'm not that confident with captioning yet to do it myself) GideonJones (talk) 06:25, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sweet redirects to sweetness???

There is a rock and roll band named sweet but now it redirects to sweetness. You have to search on The Sweet to get to the band but that's no their name. Ozmaweezer 15:07, 12 November 2007 (UTC)