The Sweetest Thing
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Oh y wait, you're listening? Alright.
You're listening to Radio Lab.
Radio M. From W N Y C
All right, so Latif, what are we doing today?
Uh we're gonna go on a hunt.
All right.
That actually starts in my car. I was with my two kids. I think at that point my kids were six and three, maybe. And the U two song The Sweetest Thing comes on. Do you know that song?
Of
course. Yeah, of course.
It's a bop.
Yeah. It's my favorite of their songs. Yeah. And my kids who have never heard the song before, if they're listening to a song and they ask, What is the sweetest thing?
Did you try love? Were you like love?
Yeah, no. My kids, they don't care about that. They were just like, no, no, no, but what really is the sweetest thing?
So just what's the sweetest thing I can get in my mouth?
Yeah. They're kids, they love sugar. Yeah, of course. Right now they're obsessed with gummy bears. And they just wanted to know, is there some other thing out there we've never had before that's even sweeter? So I figured like I'm a journalist. I can answer this.
Well, Latif, bless your amazing children who I adore. Do you care about this question? Yeah.
Yes. Why? Because okay, cause it sounds like a dumb, simple question. Or
not a dumb question, but it seems like it has an answer. And then you're like.
I kind of expected it would be that way too, but then this question turned out to be so much more. More than just a a hunt for like a substance, it became like this thing where I was trying to get to the edge of human experience. And sweetness as one of those experiences. It's this basic familiar thing that we all know. It's like almost mundane. But I kept finding that, wait a second, like no no no no, the edges even further to these levels of sweetness that I didn't even know existed in the first place. And there's some mind hacks and brain lasers and space raspberries. There's a lot of fun stuff along the way.
All right. All right. Let's go.
Okay. All right. So the very first thing that I found right off the bat, I found all these scientists.
Why do Latif’s kids ask “What is the sweetest thing?”
Check, check, check.
Okay.
Hey, okay. Hello. Who are out there trying to answer rigorously scientifically this exact kid question.
My name is Eric Walters. C can I call you Eric? Please do.
You don't have to doctor me. Like Eric here, a biochemist who used to work at Nutrisweet, where he developed artificial sweeteners.
I spent a lot of my career working on sweeteners, studying sweeteners, and ultimately writing a book about sweeteners.
And what scientists like Eric in the food industry do is they find or even make.
New sweet molecules. Yeah. Yeah. Tweaking the structure in small ways and seeing does it get better or worse?
And then they literally rank them in terms of sweetness. Yeah. And they keep like a like a list of the sweetest things on earth.
Oh.
And I want to walk you up my top five of the list using table sugar as our baseline here.
Because that's the most common sugar that we use every day.
Okay, great. So Number five. Honey. You know honey. Heard of it? Honey is about 1.5 times sweeter than sugar.
Which what does that mean? It's just it's just what
does that mean? So typically in the food industry, people do this with trained taste panels. These
specialized taste testers who are really good at noticing differences in sweetness.
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