The secret behind the unique Innutri Soft Gum texture
Innutri Soft Gums are based on starch. Starch is probably the most common food in human nutrition. Bread is made of flour and flour is basically starch. Pasta is made of wheat and wheat is mostly starch. Wheat like maize, rice, barley, oats, millet, sorghum and many, many other varieties are cereals and the grains of cereals are mainly starch.
Cereals grow above the earth and tubers grow below the earth. Potatoes, tapioca, manioc are tubers and they also mostly contain starch. Starch is stored energy. Human digestion transforms different foods into sugar and sugar is the basic molecule which provides energy to each single cell of the body. Starch is efficiently transformed into sugar and thus starch provides the energy for your physical and mental activities.
Starch is a macromolecule, a big molecule. Water is a small molecule. Guess how much bigger in weight is a starch macromolecule compared to a water molecule? 10 times or 1’000 times or 100’000 times?
Comparing the size of starch macromolecules
Starch macromolecules can have various sizes. The biggest ones can be up to 10 million times bigger in weight than a water molecule! And your digestion is so efficient that within halve an hour this giant molecule is cut by the molecular scissors of digestion enzymes into 1 million pieces. The dwarfs among the starch macromolecules are still 5’000 times bigger than a water molecule.
Starch macromolecules are composed of a geometrical structure which is an extremely small ring 10 million times smaller than a millimetre in diameter. At a closer look the ring is about a hexagon and built from carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms. And many such hexagons or rings are linked together when a starch macromolecule is growing in a potato, in a grain.
In an Innutri Soft Gum quite a small amount of starch is sufficient to provide its unique soft and bouncy texture. Depending on size and weight of the Soft Gum, the starch is in the range of about 0.3g, really a negligible quantity. But let’s guess now the length of all the extremely small rings aligned that build the starch macromolecules in that Soft Gum!
The length of the starch macromolecules in a Innutri Soft Gum
Could this length be as big as the diameter of your hair? That would be in the range of about 0.05 millimetre. Or may be somewhat bigger since there must be a great number of such rings even in a very small amount of starch such as contained in a Innutri Soft Gum? What about 1 centimetre? – Too much?
Not really. The length of all those extremely tiny rings made of atoms is supposed to be longer. Longer than 1 metre even! If you are told the total length of them in metres, you could have a problem with the number, because you are not used to imagine really big numbers. The length is huge!
What about 1 million metres? – No, that’s only 1’000 kilometres, you can still imagine such a distance or length and that’s not enough! The filament made of all the atomic rings of the starch contained in a single Innutri Soft Gum goes 27’000 times around our earth, 2’800 times from earth to the moon or 7 times from here to the sun. Think about when you chew it! – Cheers!
From the solar system to the Milky Way
Isn’t it amazing? Hard to believe indeed. The ring which is the basic building unit of starch macromolecules, is much too small to be visible by a light microscope and such a smallness combined with a small Soft Gum ends up in an astronomic length!
In our galaxy, in the Milky Way, there are about 100 thousand millions of stars. The number of the extremely small rings of the starch in a soft gum is even much bigger, it is equal to the number of stars of about 300 millions of such milky ways! That’s why all the extremely small rings aligned together make up a filament which goes 7 times from here on earth to the sun.
We get now close to our secret, how to make this soft and bouncy, elastic texture of our Soft Gums. What are filaments good for? To weave, knit or not fabrics! Think of a web such as for a hammock or for a fishing net. Then think about such a net that is not in 2 dimensions, but is a 3 dimensional network. Then take the extremely thin filament which goes a few times from here to the sun and back again and then fabricate with this filament such a 3 dimensional network. Its size is supposed to be about the size of a Soft Gum, fill the empty space of the network with a syrup mixed with selected ingredients and a suitable flavour. That’s all, the Innutri Soft Gum is finished. And oh! – Production time should be in the range of about 1 minute. Let’s go!
The starch network of a Innutri Soft Gum – Weaving beyond light speed
From here on earth to the sun the light takes more than 8 minutes. Seven times that way would make nearly an hour for the light to travel along the length of the filament that has to be used for making the starch network of a Innutri Soft Gum. Weaving with light speed would be far too slow. You have to be faster! Although faster than light is not possible, Einstein has found.
But nevertheless, don’t underestimate molecules just because they are invisible and small, they are very swift! The real 3 dimensional network of starch macromolecules which provides the gummy elastic texture of Innutri Soft Gums is established in a much shorter time by a coordinated, self-organized assembly of the clever starch macromolecules.