The use of food products designed to mimic the sensory properties of sweet and fat while providing fewer calories has been promoted as a method for reducing food intake and body weight. However, such products may interfere with a learned relationship between the sensory properties of food and the caloric consequences of consuming those foods. In the present experiment, we examined whether use o...

BACKGROUND Low-calorie and no-calorie sweeteners (LCSs) have emerged as alternatives to added sugars. Research suggests that consumption among all Americans is increasing, yet it is unknown whether consumption trends differ among population subgroups. OBJECTIVE Our study aimed to assess recent national trends in LCS consumption among children and other demographic subgroups in the United Stat...

Humans and animals such as rats and mice tend to overconsume calorie-dense foods, a phenomenon that likely contributes to obesity. One often-advanced explanation for why we preferentially consume sweet and fatty foods is that they are more "rewarding" than low-calorie foods. "Reward" has been subdivided into three interdependent psychological processes: hedonia (liking a food), reinforcement (f...

BACKGROUND Although obesity continues to rise and remains a great public health concern in the U.S., a number of important levers such as self-perception of weight and calorie postings at point-of-purchase in restaurants are still not well-characterized in the literature, especially for low-income and minority groups in Los Angeles County (LAC). To study this gap, we examined the associations o...

OBJECTIVE Exposure to high-calorie foods may promote overeating by stimulating brain reward pathways and appetite. Abdominal fat has particularly adverse metabolic consequences and may alter brain pathways that regulate feeding behavior. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to test the hypothesis that high-calorie food cues activate brain reward regions and increase appetite, a...

Computer vision has been introduced to estimate calories from food images. But current food image datasets dont contain volume and mass records of foods, which leads to an incomplete calorie estimation. In this paper, we present a novel food image dataset with volume and mass records of foods, and a deep learning method for food detection, to make a complete calorie estimation. Our dataset incl...

Food choices are a key determinant of dietary intake, with brain regions, such as the mesolimbic and prefrontal cortex maturing at differential rates into adulthood. More needs to be understood about developmental changes in healthy unhealthy food perceptions preference. We investigated how preference vary function age attributes (taste health) impact age-related changes. One hundred thirty-nin...

The calculation of calorie consumption is paramount importance for the human diet and health management. Most existing solutions use image-processing techniques to identify food type refer nutrition table compute total calorie, which quite challenging differentiate foods that look same but contain vastly different quantities calories. To address this issue, we propose leverage near-infrared spe...

Reducing sugar intake is a major public health goal but many consumers are reluctant to use low calorie sweeteners. Two studies were conducted in healthy adults aged 18 to 65 to investigate whether addition of culinary spices to foods reduced in sugar could preserve hedonic liking. Test foods, black tea, oatmeal, and apple crisp, were prepared in full sugar (FS), reduced sugar (RS), and reduced...

Abstract As people become wealthy, the type of food they consume tends to fundamentally change. Bennett’s law states that budget share starchy staples, such as cereals and rice, decline household income rises, while other foods, meat vegetables, rise. We argue an important factor behind this shift is extent which caloric value household’s diet meets their energy needs. When too low, demand for ...