Some people love the taste of diet drinks, while others can spot them instantly, no matter how they’re disguised. No matter what it is, one sip and their taste buds know a cruel trick has been played on them. It’s baffled scientists for years, because we’re only supposed to have one way to taste sweetness. It turns out, though, there’s a second one, built specifically to spot frauds.
Scientists have known for years that we have sugar receptors elsewhere in the digestive tract, but they were designed only to detect simple sugars, like glucose, not the complex melds of glucose and fructose that you find in food. They were also, supposedly, limited to the intestines and pancreas, but it turns out, not so much!
A research team from the Monell Chemical Senses Center discovered that these simple sugar detectors are also located on the tongue. Specifically, the tongue’s sweet taste receptors secrete enzymes that break up complex sugars, so when an artificial sweetener hits the tongue and gets cleaved apart, your taste buds more or less tell you that this is not actually sugar, and maybe stop eating it.
This might lead to the discovery of better artificial sweeteners that taste more like sugar with the nasty aftertaste. Of course, there are potentially other problems with these sweeteners, so just it might make a bit more sense to stick with sugar and, uh, just drink more water?
(via Eureka Alert)
