In the lab, we wanted to find out which carbohydrates tasted the sweetest: monosaccharides, disaccharides, or polysaccharides? Carbohydrates which are monosaccharides and disaccharides have a significantly sweeter taste than carbohydrates which are polysaccharides. Fructose, which definitely stood out as the sweetest carbohydrate, had 180 as its degree of sweetness on a sweetness scale of 0 to 200. We set the sweetness level of sucrose as 100 initially, and then worked around it as we tasted all of the other carbohydrates. We chose fructose to be 180, significantly sweeter than sucrose. Sucrose and fructose, both monosaccharides, tasted sweeter than all the other carbohydrates that were sampled. The lowest numbers on the sweetness scale were both given by polysaccharides: starch and cellulose. Starch and cellulose both had fine, powdery textures, and tasted very bland, without the faintest hint of sweetness. While collecting initial information, we found that sucrose and fructose, the sweetest tasting carbohydrates, are both found in fruit, table sugar, sugar cane; foods which have a sweet taste. Polysaccharides such as starch and cellulose are found in foods such as potatoes and vegetables, which have a bland, non-sweet taste.
   
     Polysaccharides are made up of many monosaccharide rings that are all bonded together. Since a chemical bond is stored energy, if there are more bonds, then there is more energy in that carbohydrate. Therefore, if an organism were to eat a carbohydrate that was a polysaccharide such as starch or cellulose, that organism would benefit from the energy. As humans, we try to eat foods that contain carbohydrates such as starch before a long run because of the amount of energy stored in it. Polysaccharides such as starch would probably be more desirable due to this energy.

   Although every person tasted the same carbohydrates, they gave different ratings on the sweetness scale. Everyone would have tasted the carbohydrates in a unique way because their taste buds taste different substances differently. Also, taste is something that is extremely subjective, and prone to observer bias, so the numbers would have certainly varied. There might have also been error of the taster due to whether they accurately remembered the sweetness of each carbohydrate. Even though the ratings varied, the overall trend was the same. Most people found that polysaccharides tasted less sweet than the monosaccharides and disaccharides.

    According to NCBI, for any food that we eat or drink, there are taste receptors in the taste buds on the mucous membrane that test the taste of food. Chemical substances from the food are recognized by the sensory cells. According to Popular science, people who have a lot of papillae on their tongue taste certain flavors stronger than others who have less papillae. The chemicals on our tongue that trigger recognition of the five senses vary between people, causing them to taste foods slightly differently. This may have caused some of the varying ratings in our sweetness lab.