Consumption of reduced energy dense foods and drink has the potential to reduce energy intake and postprandial blood glucose concentrations. In addition, the taste quality of a meal (e.g., sweet or savoury) may play a role in satiation and food intake. The objective of this randomised crossover study was to examine whether energy density and taste quality has an impact on energy intake and post...

OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to evaluate the influence of sweet taste perception on dietary habits in Saudi schoolchildren. In addition, the relationship between dietary habits and both caries and BMI was studied. METHODS A cross-sectional observational study comprising 225 schoolchildren aged 13-15 years from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was conducted. The consumption frequency of certain fo...

Rational junk-food consumption is analyzed within an expected lifetime utility maximizing framework in which longevity and productivity rise with health, and health deteriorates with junk-food consumption. As long as the junk food’s relative taste-price differential is positive, the consumer’s rational diet deviates from the physiologically optimal one and generates lower than maximal levels of...

Non-separable intertemporal preferences and novelty consumption can explain the persistent correlation between economic development and obesity. Employing the German reunification as a fast motion natural experiment of economic development, we study how the sudden availability of novel food products impacts individual consumption patterns and body weight. Immediately after the reunification, Ea...

Non-separable intertemporal preferences and novelty consumption have the potential to explain the persistent correlation between economic development and obesity. Employing the German reunification as a fast motion natural experiment of economic development, we study how the sudden availability of novel food products impacts individual consumption patterns and body weight. Immediately after the...

When confronted with an anxiety-producing threat to self-esteem, restrained eaters (dieters) increase their food consumption. The functional explanation suggests that increased eating temporarily counteracts or masks dysphoria for the restrained eater; externality or stimulus sensitivity theories propose that distress shifts the dieter's attention to external stimulus properties (e.g., taste) a...

A growing body of behavioral and genetic information indicates that taste perception and food sources are highly coordinated across many animal species. For example, sweet taste perception is thought to serve to detect and motivate consumption of simple sugars in plants that provide calories. Supporting this is the observation that most plant-eating mammals examined exhibit functional sweet per...