ABSTRACT
Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami are the ve identied classied categories of taste (Lindemann 2001). Over humans’ evolution, sweetness and bitterness played a key role to survival. Sweetness provided the means to seek out an energy source in the form of carbohydrates, and bitterness resulted in an aversion to potentially deadly substances found in nature, for example, alkaloids and toxins (Meyers and Brewer 2008). Nowadays, besides the familiar carbohydrate of sugar (sucrose, SUCR), a great number of other sweetening compounds (which may not even belong in the nutritional group of carbohydrates) have found extensive applications in food chemistry.
