Gymnema Tea: Disrupting Taste
Essential Questions
How does your body detect when food is sweet?
What would happen if those detectors didn’t work right?
What we hope you learn by the end of this lesson:
Our bodies have sensory cells that perceive and communicate signals that result in our brains sensing sweet taste. Both sugar and artificial sweeteners stimulate these sensory cells.
Blood glucose levels are regulated to say within a healthy range. Type 2 diabetes is the result of chronic high blood glucose levels over time.
This module has four parts to it, followed by a review. Each part can be accessed through the menu.
More information about this lesson and others can be found on here, including detailed description of how this lesson connects to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, Lead States, 2013)
Credits: Thank you to the following teachers for contributing to this lesson:
Jody Doty, Glide High School, Glide, OR
Kathleen Dunn, Wapato High School, Wapato, WA
Joshua Hayes, Redmond High School, Redmond, WA
Source Material:
This lesson was built on the following published research:
Margolskee RF, Dyer J, Kokrashvili Z, Salmon KS, Ilegems E, Daly K, Maillet EL, Ninomiya Y, Mosinger B, Shirazi-Beechey SP. T1R3 and gustducin in gut sense sugars to regulate expression of Na+-glucose cotransporter 1. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Sep 18;104(38):15075-80. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0706678104. Epub 2007 Aug 27. PMID: 17724332; PMCID: PMC1986615.