The Sweetness and Pleasantness of Sugars

Nine experiments were run to assess the relation between sweetness, pleasantness, and the concentrations of 43 sugars. A power function adequately related the sweetness, S, of most sugars to their concentration, C: S = kCn, where the intercept k is a measure of relative sweetness. The average exponent is about 1.3, and the results suggest that the large range of relative sweetness across sugars is correlated with differences in molecular structure. The pleasantness of sugars was not monotonic with concentration but systematically departed from linearity at high concentrations. Pleasantness as a function of sweetness was roughly linear in log-log coordinates, with a slope between .3 and .5.