Sweet taste
Sweet taste is one of the most pleasurable senses. Its goal is to detect highly calorific saccharides for ingestion, possibly reflecting evolutionary pressures to select foods high in energy.Sweeteners such as saccharin, and naturally occurring sugars such as sucrose, glucose, fructose and alcohol sugars, elicit a sweet taste mediated through a heterodimer of G protein-coupled receptors encoded by two genes, TAS1R2 and TAS1R3. In addition, it has been shown that the T1R3 gene has the ability to form a T1R3/T1R3 homodimer that is sensitive to monosaccharides and disaccharides, but only at high concentrations.
According to twin studies, approximately half of the variation in sweet taste preference (49-54%) is genetically conditioned. The remaining variability could be attributed to factors such as age and BMI.
