Question

The sweetest chemical is
a. Fructose
b. Saccharin
c. Monellin
d. Thaumatin

Answer 1

Sweetness is a taste where we generally perceive when we eat any sugar-rich foods, and this sweet taste is pleasurable, normally cane sugar is sweet and it contains sucrose, apart from this there are other chemical compounds which are also sweet, those include aldehydes, ketones, and sugar alcohols.

Complete answer:
- The common sugar where we use in our daily life is cane sugar which is sucrose and they have a lot of calorific value.
- But some compounds are sweet, but when coming to concentration, it is low and they are used as non-caloric sugars, an example is aspartame, saccharine.
- Sucrose is a prototypical model of the sweet, so all other sugars are rated utilizing sucrose, examples are fructose which is 1.7 times sweeter than sucrose.
- And among the sweetest chemicals in the world is Thaumatin, which is a protein that obtains from Thaumatococcus danielli from west Africa.
- Where the sweetness of the Thaumatin is in the range of 2000 times greater than that of sucrose.
- Even though we called it the sweetest compound, the exact taste of the compound is different entirely from all sugars.
- When someone tastes it, the sweetness of the compound builds up slowly where it lasts for a very long time and it gives licorice-like taste.
- It is a water soluble compound and it is stable when it is heated under some acidic conditions.
- So compared to all sugars given in the above question, Thaumatin is considered as the sweetest chemical in the world.

Hence, the correct answer is option (D).

Note: The plant from which Thaumatin is obtained is a rhizomatous herb, and it consists of soft fruits and purple flowers, and they also have shiny black seeds, and the sweetest protein is obtained from soft fruits, and the black seeds and flowers also have medicinal value.