Why sugar makes coffee taste good
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.029085
The Daily Telegraph : A spoonful of sugar doesn’t just mask the bitter taste of caffeine in coffee in a process called caffeine dimerization; it also changes the chemistry of the drink. Previously, sugar and salt were thought to simply change the water structure of the drink, but new statistical thermodynamics research, published in Food and Function by Seishi Shimizu of York University, has turned this idea on its head. The sugar actually causes the caffeine molecules to clump together, so they have less surface area to stimulate the taste buds. Shimizu tells The Telegraph that such findings “show how complex the study of food is and that we should be conducting research using first principle physics to better understand it.”