Sweetness and Sweetener Interactions
Sweetness is probably the first taste sensation recognized by human beings after birth. It is the main taste/flavor attributed to carbohydrate, even though relatively few carbohydrates are actually sweets. Human can recognize sweetness in hundreds, perhaps thousand, of different, vastly diverse molecules, yet very little is actually known about the sweet taste receptor and the sequence of biophysical events that take place for the sweet taste sensation to occur.
There is a theory named AH-B theory to explain what is needed structurally and chemically to make a molecule sweet. They postulated that a sweet molecule needed two points of attachment to sweet receptor. There was a proposed that the sweet taste receptor has at least eight points of attachment that can interact with a chemical to produce a sweet taste, attempting thereby to better explain the range of chemicals that taste sweet.
Only a few of many hundreds of known sweet chemicals are used in foods. Sucrose, common table sugar, constitutes the benchmark by which all other sweeteners are judge. Other food carbohydrates, with the exception of fructose and xylitol, are less sweet than sucrose, and the noncarbohydrates sweeteners are many times sweeter than sucrose.
Sweetness and Sweetener Interactions
