Why rice is chewed more and more sweetened, it turns out that saliva amylase acts

Director of the Department of Nutrition, Affiliated Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital of Southwest Medical University Li Ming

Many people must have such an experience, bananas, rice more chewy more sweet, this is because of the role of saliva amylase in our mouth.

Sugars such as monosaccharides, disaccharides and polysaccharides. Among these sugars, the sweetest is generally disaccharides, such as sucrose and maltose.

This is followed by simple sugars, such as glucose, fructose, etc.

The sweetness of starch is very low, and it belongs to polysaccharides.

Therefore, the rice we often eat (the main ingredient is starch) is generally not sweet.

However, if you eat rice and chew it a few more times, it will feel a little sweet, and the same is true for bananas. This is because in the process of chewing, salivary amylase acts on the starch in bananas, allowing it to hydrolyze into sugars with a smaller molecular weight. In general, the larger the molecular weight, the lower the sweetness; The smaller the molecular weight, the higher the sweetness. So, we can feel the sweetness.

If it is not chewed, then salivary amylase cannot be well contacted with starch, and then the sweeter low-molecular-molecule sugar cannot be "produced", so it is not sweet.

Of course, since the amount of saliva amylase in the mouth is not much, it only feels a slight sweetness, not particularly sweet.

Editor-in-Charge: Nemo