Obesity rates have doubled in the last forty years, and a major cause is the consumption of sugarsweetened beverages. In this paper, we identify channels through which information – about health benefits or taste affects beverage choice. We conduct a field experiment in a school lunchroom with 2,500 children, evaluating the impact of informational prompts on beverage choice and consumption over...

The Tas1r3 gene encodes the T1R3 receptor protein, which is involved in sweet taste transduction. To characterize ligand specificity of the T1R3 receptor and the genetic architecture of sweet taste responsiveness, we analyzed taste responses of 129.B6-Tas1r3 congenic mice to a variety of chemically diverse sweeteners and glucose polymers with three different measures: consumption in 48-h two-bo...

Increased energy consumption, especially increased consumption of sweet energy-dense food, is thought to be one of the main contributors to the escalating rates in overweight individuals and obesity globally. The individual's ability to detect or sense sweetness in the oral cavity is thought to be one of many factors influencing food acceptance, and therefore, taste may play an essential role i...

sociomusicology (sociology of music) as a branch of art sociology aims at identifying the relationships between music and social structures. the main question faced by the sociologists of music is how the conditions of a given social system affect the dominant music style of a culture or the subculture of a group and how the public tendencies for a specific music style affect a social system an...

Human desire for sweet taste spans all ages, races, and cultures. Throughout evolution, sweetness has had a role in human nutrition, helping to orient feeding behavior toward foods providing both energy and essential nutrients. Infants and young children in particular basemany of their food choices on familiarity and sweet taste. The low cost and ready availability of energycontaining sweetener...

Artificially sweetened beverage consumption has been linked to obesity, and it has been hypothesized that considerable exposure to nonnutritive sweeteners may be associated with impaired energy regulation. The reward system plays an integral role in modulating energy intake, but little is known about whether habitual use of artificial sweetener (i.e., diet soda consumption) may be related to al...

The present experiment examined the influence of insular cortex (IC) lesions on the intake of a taste stimulus in a consummatory procedure that used morphine as the unconditioned stimulus. In normal rats, morphine caused a rapid reduction in saccharin intake when the taste was novel but not when it was familiar. Irrespective of stimulus novelty, morphine had little influence on the saccharin co...

The highlight for February is from Chris Cunningham of the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at the Oregon Health & Science University. In Dr. Cunningham’s highlight, he describes his initial introduction to the general field of taste aversion learning and the specific direction he has taken over the past 30 years. As he describes, the majority of his work on aversion learning has focused o...

When a novel taste has been associated with postingestive malaise, animals recognize this taste as aversive. This associative learning is known as conditioned taste aversion. However, when an animal consumes a novel taste and no aversive consequences follow, it becomes recognized as a safe signal, leading to an increase in its consumption in subsequent presentations. In this review, we will dis...

Evidence linking sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption to weight gain and other negative health outcomes has prompted many individuals to resort to artificial, non-nutritive sweetener (NNS) substitutes as a means of reducing SSB intake. However, there is a great deal of controversy regarding the biological consequences of NNS use, with accumulating evidence suggesting that NNS consumption ...