Abstract
Cane sugar was known to early humans as a sweet and pleasant-tasting material. The most common physical property ascribed to carbohydrates is sweetness. Not all carbohydrates, however, are sweet, and different carbohydrates have different degrees of sweetness. After it was determined that carbohydrates differed from each other by the stereochemical arrangement of their chiral hydroxyl groups, it was also recognized that they had different degrees of sweetness. D-Glucose is sweet, D-fructose and D-xylose are much sweeter, D-galactose is devoid of sweetness, and D-mannose is bitter. Among the disaccharides, sucrose is very sweet, maltose is mildly sweet, lactose is only very slightly sweet, and gentiobiose is bitter. These observations suggest that the differences in sweetness of the carbohydrates are due to differences in the stereochemical arrangements of their chiral hydroxyl groups. Table 5.1 lists the relative sweetness of a number of carbohydrates.
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Robyt, J.F. (1998). Sweetness. In: Essentials of Carbohydrate Chemistry. Springer Advanced Texts in Chemistry. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1622-3_5
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