From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!zeppo!whuxlb!ech Newsgroups: net.cooks Title: Eating Isomers Article-I.D.: whuxlb.285 Posted: Tue Jun 8 13:06:15 1982 Received: Wed Jun 9 01:10:51 1982 A general discussion of this issue may be found in Martin Gardner's "The Ambidextrous Universe," with the usual nice bibliography. In general your body does treat right- and left-handed (dextro- and levo-) compounds differently - right-handed amino acids cannot be metabolized at all, for example - but that includes taste. The name escapes me at the moment, but I seem to recall that lemons and limes have the same characteristic flavor molecule, except that one is levo, the other dextro. I'd be quite surprised to learn of a sucrose equivalent which tasted the same but was otherwise unmetabolized... =Ned Horvath=