Sweetness Lab

Sweetness Lab

In this lab we asked the question, how does the structure of a carbohydrate affect its taste (sweetness)? I found that the less rings a carbohydrate had, the sweeter it tasted. Monosaccharides seemed to be the sweetest and then disaccharides being a little less sweet, while polyosaccharides were just bland or nearly tasteless. In the lab, we tasted sucrose, glucose, fructose, galactose, maltose, lactose, starch, and cellulose. The sweetest was fructose, a monosaccharide, being at 150 on a scale from 0-200. Second was glucose, also a monosaccharide, at 125 on the same scale. But sucrose, a disaccharide, was third ranking at 100, while galactose was fourth at 90. The rest pretty much went downhill from there. As shown in the picture below and stated above, monosaccharides seem to be sweeter than the rest and the more rings a carbohydrate has, the less sweet it is. Perhaps the less rings a carbohydrate has, the easier it is to digest and store away for later use.
My data was a little unexpected because I thought sucrose tasted better than galactose even though sucrose is a disaccharide and galactose is a monosaccharide. I also expected the polysaccharides to taste much worse, but they only were bland or tasteless. Also, I wasn't exactly looking forward to eating cellulose, so I took the tiniest pinch while with fructose, I knew it would taste good so I took a lot. Due to these errors, in further experiments I would recommend controlling the amount of each carbohydrate each student ate.
This lab was done to demonstrate how different structure of carbohydrates can affect the sweetness of it. From this lab I learned a little more about the different tastes and structures of carbohydrates which helped me understand the concept of monosaccharides, disaccharides, and polysaccharides even more. Based on my experience from this lab, I know to stay away from pure cellulose and to not eat too many monosaccharides.
Not everybody rated the different carbohydrates the exact same way everyone else did because we all have different taste buds. Maybe one person eats sugar all the time so fructose doesn't taste very sweet while another person could almost never eat sugar, and when he/she does, they think it is very sweet. Also, someone could've burned their tongue so some of their taste buds could be temporarily out of order. According to Dr. Robert Margolyskee, a molecular neurobiologist from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, humans taste sweetness by taste buds sending a message to the sweetness respondent of your central nervous system. But monosaccharides and disaccharides trigger an extra mechanism that let us taste it as being sweet. Margolyskee said that all people can taste sweet, but there is a wide range of preference.