PHILADELPHIA, USA – Researchers at Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, and Suntory Beverage & Food Limited, Tokyo, have discovered a new sensory ability in humans to detect sugars in the mouth with energy-burning capabilities.
One of the major roles of our sense of taste is to inform us when sugar is present in food by eliciting sweetness on tongues.
Paul A. S. Breslin, lead author of the research, and colleagues reported the first-in-human demonstration of a signalling pathway that uses glucose, a component of high fructose corn syrup and table sugar, to indicate the presence of calories, in addition, to evoke sweet-taste in taste buds receptors. High-fructose corn syrup has been commonly used as a sweetener in sodas and fruit-flavoured drinks.
In a series of human-taste experiments, the team compared oral glucose sensitivity to the ability to sense sucralose, an artificial sweetener, and to α-Methyl-D-Glucopyranoside (MDG), a non-metabolizable glucose analogue.
Breslin said that our mouth could identify a sweetener that had the potential to deliver calories and that not, i.e., non-caloric sweetener. Hence, got the answer of why diet sodas never captured a major share of the beverage market, i.e., because of the second glucose-sensing system in the mouth that detect healthier beverages that people enjoy drinking.
The research 'Evidence that human oral glucose detection involves a sweet taste pathway and a glucose transporter pathway' has recently been published in PLOS ONE.
