Almost universally regarded as a pleasurable experience...by the ''sober''. —[[User:Gravity Control|₲ravity ₵ontrol]] <span style="font-size: smaller;" class="autosigned">—Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures|undated]] comment added 23:59, 23 November 2009 (UTC).</span><!--Template:Undated--> <!--Autosigned by SineBot-->
Almost universally regarded as a pleasurable experience...by the ''sober''. —[[User:Gravity Control|₲ravity ₵ontrol]] <span style="font-size: smaller;" class="autosigned">—Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures|undated]] comment added 23:59, 23 November 2009 (UTC).</span><!--Template:Undated--> <!--Autosigned by SineBot-->
== Elepus? ==
I don't have time to look it up but I'm pretty sure that the line about elepus ("and elepus is more than 9 times sweeter than sucrose.") should go, considering that elepus doesn't seem to be a real thing.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Food and drink, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of food and drink related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Food and drinkWikipedia:WikiProject Food and drinkTemplate:WikiProject Food and drinkFood and drink articles
Delete unrelated trivia sections found in articles. Please review WP:Trivia and WP:Handling trivia to learn how to do this.
Add the {{WikiProject Food and drink}} project banner to food and drink related articles and content to help bring them to the attention of members. For a complete list of banners for WikiProject Food and drink and its child projects, select here.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Neuroscience, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Neuroscience on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.NeuroscienceWikipedia:WikiProject NeuroscienceTemplate:WikiProject Neuroscienceneuroscience articles
Expand : *Evolutionary function of finding sweet foods pleasurable (and the optimality of the system)
-e.g. quick supply of glucose which can be metabolized very quickly
Neuroscience behind sweetness perception
Basis of measurement of sweetness, and more on the mechanism of taste buds detecting sweetness (what are the 'sweetness detectors' and what is their chemistry?
Dextrose comes in left- and right-handed enantiomers; only the right-handed version can be metabolized. Does the left-handed version (levose?) taste sweet?
Did you mean Levulose? "... Levulose [has] a natural taste similar to that of sugar but more mellowed." from [http://diabeticsdezire.com/faq.html] Monkeyman 01:52, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I don't think that that's actually mirror-dextrose, from the description. I would expect mirror-dextrose to have zero caloric content but it might be sweet; I have no idea. --Andrew 02:14, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
The left-handed monosaccharides are similar in taste to their natural counterparts, but cannot be metabolized. The sweetness receptor does not appear to be specific to any particular compound, but rather to recognize a broad range of compounds, so the fact that mirror saccharides are sweet is not terribly surprising. Shimmin 21:13, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
Seek out a referece for this point, as I heard it, L-glucose had no sweetness, a faint salty flavor is all. This is logical, the same failure of the L-molecule to fit in the digestive enzyme catalytic site prevents it from acting in the taste protein "pocket". I don't have a reference for this handy, but I did taste them both in high school biology
Here's your answer: "Curiously, although d- and l-glucose are spatial enantiomers, they are prosymmetric with regard to the glycophore; that is, with regard to the sweet receptor, they are effectively identical (Shallenberger 1997), leading to the potential use of l-hexose mono- (Levin 1981) and di-saccharides (Bakal 1984) as non-caloric bulk sweeteners." Quote taken from directly from http://www.springerlink.com/content/920760277g17724r/fulltext.htmlJeh25 (talk) 02:41, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
class.64.252.24.88 (talk) 19:02, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
Ah, that's interesting! Do you know if anyone has tried to use them as sugar replacements? If they are equally sweet but cannot be metabolized, it seems one could make a reasonable sugar replacement by inorganically synthesizing, say, fructose, then letting some bug digest all the dextrose... when you say they cannot be metabolized, what does that mean? Do they pass from the digestive tract into the bloodstream? Are they safely eliminated from the body? Presumably they cannot be used as an energy source... --Andrew 00:35, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC)[reply]
While they are presumably useful as sugar substitutes, in the US at least, no one has submitted a new drug petition to the FDA for L-glucose or any other. Their chief defect is that while they are several times more expensive than sugar, they are no sweeter than sugar. Shimmin 10:22, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC)
How is sweetness measured?
Could somebody explain what exactly is meant when they say that something is 2,000x as sweet as something else? Thanks! DanKeshet 05:14, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)
My understanding of sweetness, and it may be wrong, is that the sweetness of something is determined by the number of molecules that that substance takes to trigger the sweetness receptor in the taste bud. For example, let's say that it takes 10,000 molecules of substance X to trigger the sweetness receptor in tastebuds. Now let's say that it takes only 5,000 molecules of substance Y to trigger the sweetness receptor in the tastebuds. You could say that substance Y is twice as sweet as substance X. And if it only took 1 molecule of substance Z to activate the receptors, substance Z would be 10,000 times as sweet as substance X and 5,000 times as sweet substance Y.
The slate link is correct, but the problem remains that the phrase “X times sweeter than sucrose" is very misleading for two reasons: a) “high-intensity” sweeteners are rarely sweeter than concentrated sucrose; instead, the ratio refers to the amount needed to evoke a threshold (ie very very weak) response and b) it mistakenly implies that that all sweeteners have similar psychophysical slopes across concentration when in reality the relative sweetness of a compound to sucrose varies greatly across concentration. Jeh25 (talk) 19:53, 26 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Irrelevant material?
The intro has the following at the end of it.
In the English language, things that are pleasant in a more general sense are often called sweet, in phrases such as "sweet rest," "sweet revenge," "sweet dreams," or "home sweet home." In many other languages, both ancient and modern, the adjective meaning sweet can also be used to describe things that are in any way very good.
What does this have to do with the topic? The topic seems to be related to the sense of taste. This material is not relevant and detracts from the article. At best this material belongs in another article but, frankly, I'm not sure what that article would be able. Wikipedia, after all, is not a dictionary.
I'm going to going to remove this. If somebody has a different viewpoint, feel free to restore, rephrase, comment, or whatever.
Does the photograph of the girl with the lollipop really lend anything to this topic. And should it be properly captioned? (Sorry, I'm not that confident with captioning yet to do it myself) GideonJones (talk) 06:25, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Sweet redirects to sweetness???
There is a rock and roll band named sweet but now it redirects to sweetness. You have to search on The Sweet to get to the band but that's no their name. Ozmaweezer15:07, 12 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
almost universally regarded as a pleasurable experience
Not necessarily. If you're drunk or hungover, it's more likely you'll be repulsed by the idea of eating sweet food, but savoury food will appeal to you greatly.--So Oaty (talk) 15:48, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have time to look it up but I'm pretty sure that the line about elepus ("and elepus is more than 9 times sweeter than sucrose.") should go, considering that elepus doesn't seem to be a real thing.