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Glucose is the simplest of sugars and is a circle of carbon atoms with oxygen and hydrogen atoms attached to the ring.
A chemical in the stevia plant also produces sweet flavors.
Chemists have developed a number of lab-made chemicals that taste sweet and are sold as no-sugar sweeteners.
Evan Amos/WikimediaCommons
Artificial sweeteners
The third way to make something sweet is to add artificial sweeteners. These chemicals are produced in labs and factories and are not found in nature. Like all things that taste sweet, they do so because they can bind to certain receptors in taste buds.
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So far, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved six artificial sweeteners. The most well known are probably saccharin, aspartame and sucralose – better known as Splenda. Artificial sweeteners all have different chemical formulas. Some resemble natural sugars while others are radically different. They are usually many times sweeter than sugar – saccharin is an incredible 200 to 700 times sweeter than table sugar – and some of them are hard for the body to break down.
While a sweet dessert may be a simple pleasure for many, the chemistry of how your taste buds perceive sweetness is not so simple. Only molecules with the perfect combination of atoms taste sweet, but bodies deal with each of these molecules differently when it comes to calories.
Kristine Nolin, Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of Richmond
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
