Influence of the Number of Chewing Cycles on the Sweetness and Saltiness Intensity of Agarose Gel

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the relationship between the size of food pieces generated by chewing and the taste intensity during mastication, using cubic gels of two sizes made from agarose of different molecular weights. The intensities of both sweetness and saltiness increased to peak intensity and then decreased with increasing number of chewing cycles, irrespective of the gel sample size and of the molecular weight of agarose gels used. The suppression of sweet taste release was strong with high molecular weight agarose gels with a large pre-ingestion size. In the large pre-ingestion size gel, agarose of higher molecular weight required larger differences in gel fragment size for perception of significant differences in the sweetness intensity than agarose of lower molecular weight. The sodium chloride concentration eluted from agarose gel and the perception of taste was positively correlated in the early stage of mastication, but negatively correlated in the late stage.