TOWARDS AN IMPROVED UNDERSTANDING OF SWEETENER SYNERGY

Sweetener synergy is of vital practical importance to the food manufac turer but its mechanistic explanation is impossible given the current limited understanding of sweet taste chemoreception. All current psych ophysical models of response to sweet stimuli are probably incomplete, but some fit the experimental data better than others and can thus be used to predict the taste of sweetener mixtures. Some sweetener mixtu res have been unequivocally reported as synergistic but such observati ons do not in themselves constitute evidence for the existence of mult iple sweet taste receptors, and the interpretation of synergy demands analysis at the molecular level.