background & aim:   changes in lifestyle, decrease in physical exercise along with incidence of obesity, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases indicate a need for low calorie formulations. the sweetness of stevia, a natural sweetener, is estimated to be 300 times as much as that of sugar. extraction of stevia leaves is considered a promoter of calorie balance and a beneficial part of a h...

Most rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivars grown in the United States were selected for endosperm starch properties and not soluble sugar content. The minor pool of soluble sugar may affect the qualities of rice as a food. Some cultivar variation in soluble sugar content was detected in milled grain, essentially the starchy endosperm, of long grain varieties. Milled grain of cultivars Lemont and Tex...

Short-term transport studies were conducted using excised whole Zea mays kernels incubated in buffered solutions containing radiolabeled sugars. Following incubation, endosperms were removed and rates of net (14)C-sugar uptake were determined. Endogenous sugar gradients of the kernel were estimated by measuring sugar concentrations in cell sap collected from the pedicel and endosperm. A sugar c...

In a previous investigation Jackson and Mc Donald studied Ofner's method for the determination of invert sugar in sucrose. They modified the procedure and were thus able to increase the reproducibility of results when determining from 5 to 25 mg of invert sugar in the presence of sucrose. This method has now been applied to pure invert sugar and to sugar samples containing 5 mg or less of inver...

OBJECTIVE Sugar consumption has increased dramatically over the last decades in Western societies. Especially the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages seems to be a major risk for the development of obesity. Thus, we compared liquid versus solid high-sugar diets with regard to dietary intake, intestinal uptake and metabolic parameters in mice and partly in humans. METHODS Five iso-caloric diet...

Technical men outside of the sugar industry are apt to view the manufacture of sucrose from sugar beets as a most interesting and somewhat complex process. Those of us who are not sugar technologists are frequently astonished at the amount of knowledge that has been developed in that industry, at the smoothness of its operation, at the degree of operational standardizing which has taken place b...

Carbohydrates are differentially partitioned in sweet versus grain sorghums. While the latter preferentially accumulate starch in the grain, the former primarily store large amounts of sucrose in the stem. Previous work determined that neither sucrose metabolizing enzymes nor changes in Sucrose transporter (SUT) gene expression accounted for the carbohydrate partitioning differences. Recently, ...

The reducing sugar content of sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) roots increased during 30 days of storage at 21 C and 160 days at 5 C as a result of an increase in acid invertase activity. Sucrose synthetase and neutral invertase activities were high at harvest but declined during storage, thus showing no relationship with postharvest reducing sugar accumulation in sugar beet roots. Acid alpha-gluc...

Daily intermittent access to sugar solutions results in intense bouts of sugar intake (i.e. bingeing) in rats. Bingeing on sucrose, a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, has been associated with a "primed" mesolimbic dopamine (DA) pathway. Recent studies suggest glucose and fructose engage brain reward and energy-sensing mechanisms in opposing ways and may drive sucrose intake through unique ...