Sweetness Lab Write-up (yum~)

In this lab, I first took notes about eight different sugars (sucrose, glucose, fructose, galactose, maltose, lactose, starch, and cellulose), drew their structure, and tasted them, ranking the sweetness level and texture of the different sugars. Before, I predicted which sugars would taste sweet and which would NOT taste sweet, but it seems that my predictions turned out wrong. 

Will Taste Sweet: sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose

Will NOT Taste Sweet: galactose, lactose, starch, cellulose

After tasting all of the sugars and comparing the sweetness level to the number of rings in the sugar, I noticed that the more rings there are in the sugar, the less sweet it becomes; all of the sweeter sugars were monosaccharides, and the sugars with the lowest sweetness levels were polysaccharides. I have also seen and heard of a few of the carbohydrates that I tasted today, like sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, lactose, and starch. I already knew that sucrose was plain table sugar, and I had seen fructose in high fructose corn syrup, which is added into candy gummies for sugar. I have also seen maltose in malt beer and lactose on milk cartons, as a warning for people who are lactose intolerant. Lastly, I have eaten starch in my mother's own corn soup, in which she puts corn starch to make the soup more viscous. 

Humans can taste sweetness and other types of taste through taste buds on the tongue. According to Sarah Dowdey on howstuffworks (http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/parts/tongue2.htm), every taste bud has fifty gustatory receptor cells, which respond to different tastes: sweet, savory, bitter, etc. When the food/stimulus touches the gustatory cell, it sends a message to the brain, which interprets the sensation as taste, whether it be sweet, sour, etc. These cells vary from person to person, depending on what the person ate right before or how sweet the foods they normally eat are. The varying gustatory cells explain how different people can rank the sweetness level of the same food/sugar differently.