Sweet

Lore & Background

Sweetness is one of the five basic taste qualities and it mostly involves foods with sugars. It is known to be enjoyable and it is an important factor for food choices across cultures. Studies indicate that responsiveness to sugars and sweetness has very ancient evolutionary beginnings, being manifest as chemotaxis even in motile bacteria such as E. coli. Sweetness is linked with humans' ecological needs. An example involves leaf-eating primates who prefer sweeter leaves because they have more protein and less compounds. Food processing in modern society has changed consumption patterns, but the biological preference for sweetness has remained. Across human societies, sweetness has had a lot of meanings that are not just related to the role of taste quality. Anthropologists have explained that many cultures have linked sweet foods with celebration and generosity.

Reader's Guide

Sweetness is known as one of the five basic taste qualities, along with sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. Each taste is linked with its own specialized receptors that help the body to detect nutrients which is important for survival. Sweetness is linked to energy-rich carbohydrates. The perceived intensity of sugars and high-potency sweeteners, such as aspartame and neohesperidin dihydrochalcone, are heritable, with gene effect accounting for approximately 30% of the variation. Newborn human infants also demonstrate preferences for high sugar concentrations and prefer solutions that are sweeter than lactose, the sugar found in breast milk. Sweetness appears to have the highest taste recognition threshold, being detectable at around 1 part in 200 of sucrose in solution.

Did You Know?

• Some inorganic compounds are sweet, including beryllium chloride and lead(II) acetate.
• Two plant proteins, miraculin and curculin, cause sour foods to taste sweet.
• A variant in fibroblast growth factor 21 increases craving for sweet foods.