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Why is it that the more you chew rice, the sweeter it is?

08:38, February 21, 2019 | Source: People's Daily - Health Times
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Original title: Why is rice sweeter when you chew it?

(Li Ming, Director of the Nutrition Department of the Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine Affiliated to Southwest Medical University) Many people must have this experience. The more bananas and rice are chewed, the sweeter they are. This is because of the role of salivary amylase in our mouth.

Sugar consists of monosaccharide, disaccharide and polysaccharide. Among these sugars, generally the sweetest are disaccharides, such as sucrose and maltose.

The second is monosaccharide, such as glucose, fructose, etc.

Starch is very low in sweetness and belongs to polysaccharide.

Therefore, the rice we often eat (mainly composed of starch) is generally not sweet.

However, if you eat rice and chew it several times, you will feel a little sweet again, and so will bananas. This is because in the process of chewing, salivary amylase will act on the starch in bananas to hydrolyze it into sugar with smaller molecular weight. Generally speaking, the higher the molecular weight, the lower the sweetness; The smaller the molecular weight, the higher the sweetness. So, we can feel the sweetness.

If you don't chew, salivary amylase can't fully contact with starch to work, and the sweeter low molecular sugar can't be "produced", so it's not sweet.

Of course, because the amount of salivary amylase in the mouth is not much, I just feel a little sweet, not particularly sweet.

(Editor in charge: Xu Xiaohua, Yang Di)

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