Fructose as food ingredient

Fructose is a sweetener that is monosaccharide found naturally in fresh fruit and honey. It is comprise of six carbon atoms. Fructose is known as fruit sugar or laevulose.

The commercial production of fructose is mainly from glucose syrups. It is obtained by the inversion of sucrose by means of the enzymes invertase and by the isomerization of corn syrup.

Fructose is the sweetest natural saccharide and is approximately 1-1.5 times as sweet as sucrose. It is also water soluble.

It is in baked goods because it reacts with amino acids to produce a browning reaction.It is used as a nutritive sweetener in low-calorie beverages.

Some plants including chicory Jerusalem artichokes and dahlias contain appreciable quantities of the polysaccharide inulin, which is a polymer of fructose.

Fructose is different from high fructose corn syrup. HFCS is fructose bound to glucose, making its chemical composition nearly the same as that of table sugar.
Fructose as food ingredient

Fructose

Fructose
Of the other sugars used by humans, fructose (also known as levulose), a monosaccharide (C6H12O6), is the sweetest (nearly twice as sweet as the table sugar, sucrose); and it is the most water soluble of the sugars.

It is hygroscopic, making it an excellent humectant when used in baked goods. The value of a humectant in baked goods is that it retards their dehydration.

Solution of fructose have a low viscosity that results in lower ‘body’ feel than sucrose but in greater flexibility of use over a wide range of temperatures.

Because of its greater solubility and more effective sweetness than sucrose, fructose is better alternative to sucrose when very sweet solutions are required, as fructose will not crystallize out of solution, whereas sucrose will.

Fructose has sometimes been called the fruit sugar, since it occurs in many fruits and berries. It also occurs as a major component in honey, corn syrup, cane sugar and beet sugar.

In fact sucrose, a disaccharide, is composed of glucose and fructose. Of these tow components, the glucose moiety cannot be monopolized by diabetics and it is for this reason that the ingestion of sucrose cannot be tolerated by diabetics.

Fructose, on the other hand, does not require insulin for its metabolism and can be used by diabetics with no concern. When used with saccharin it tends to mask the bitter aftertaste of saccharin. As its apparently accelerates the metabolism of alcohol, it has been used to treat those suffering from overdoses of alcohol.

It has been recommended as a rapid source of energy for athletes and in combination with gluconate and saccharin, as an economic, effective, safe, low calorie sweetener for beverages.
Fructose

Sweetness and Sweetener Interactions

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