Thursday, August 27, 2015

Sweet Science

In our lab today, we tasted different forms of sugar: sucrose, glucose, fructose, galactose, maltose, lactose, starch, and cellulose. These sugars all have slightly different structures, therefore they taste different, but a pattern that we noticed was that as the number of rings increased, the sweet taste disappeared. Sucrose is what we know as table sugar or just white granulated sugar used in baking. Fructose is used primarily as a sweetener since it takes very little to increase the sweetness of food products or even just your daily coffee. The rest of the sugars aren't your classic sugars as they do not taste very sweet; this is because they are disaccharides and polysaccharides. Maltose is the malt flavor in Maltesers and Whoppers or any other malt product. Lactose is in milk and is the primary source of carbohydrates for babies. Starch is in things like pasta, bread, potatoes, and much more and is our primary source of energy. Cellulose is primarily found in vegetables and is more commonly known as fiber. 
Even though all of these are technically sugars, they definitely don't all taste sweet but they do give us the energy to go about or lives. 

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