Sweetness Lab

    The structure of the carbohydrates directly affects the sweetness. Monosaccharides are the sweetest, disaccharides are not as sweet, and polysaccharides are not sweet at all. A carbohydrate's rings affect the taste, the more rings, the less sweet. For example, the monosaccharide, glucose, has a sweetness of 95/100 meanwhile the polysaccharide, cellulose, has sweetness of 0/100.

   The structure of a carbohydrate affects how a cell/organism uses it. If the carbohydrate has three or more rings, its function for a cell and organism is more complex and is also used sometimes for storage. The one ringed carbohydrates are very commonly used by humans to sweeten their food. It will be easier for organism to use a monosaccharide compared to a polysaccharide, because it is less dense and easier to break down to get its energy.

    Not every tester gave the same rating for each carbohydrate, but to have a accurate experiment, we took the average of all four ratings if one or more disagreed. Because everyone perceives taste a bit differently  while someone might have thought it was very sweet, another tester might not think of it as sweet. Another reason for having different ratings, would be that maybe the sample could have been contaminated. Last but not least, some testers might have not rinsed their mouth of the previous carbohydrate.

  Lastly, humans are able to taste sweetness by small sensory cells. There are specific cells that taste sweetness. Because sweetness is considered part of the fifth basic taste, only the sensory cells for the fifth taste can sense them. Because of this, each tester could have perceived the sweetness differently because either their sensory cells were not as sensitive or they did not have the same quantity of sensory cells for the fifth taste.