A diet high in sugar can make rats less able to taste sweet things.
Many people have a high-sugar diet. Monica Dus says that three quarters of food in the supermarket has added sugar.
“This is not a subtle effect. It is really strong, and it only took four weeks.”
The researchers wanted to find out if the dulled sense of taste was caused by the high-sugar diet.
Rats that were fed a high-sugar diet were less responsive to sweet signals from the tongue to the brain.
A number of years ago, a study showed that decreasing the amount of sugar in the diet of humans led to more intense sugar cravings. How is that happening?
Sugar dulls sweet taste in fruit flies by lowering the responsiveness of the nerve and reprograming the taste cells, but flies are still just flies. I wanted to know if and how it happened in mammals.
Robert Bradley and Charlotte Mistretta are professors in the School of Dentistry who study how taste functions and how diet and disease can change it. The Medical School has an associate professor who studies the neurobiology of ingestive behavior in rats.
One group of rats were given access to sugar water. Rats were given access to plain water and a regular diet. The researchers stimulated the tongue with different solutions and recorded the responses of the nerve. The rat's tongue has taste buds that sense chemicals and send them to the brain.
The rats were given sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami-flavored solutions. The front of the tongue was tested to see how it would respond to those flavors.
Rats did not respond differently to salty, bitter, sour, and umami flavors than they did to table sugar, but they did not respond as well to sour, salty, and bitter flavors.
Dus says that the effect is not a subtle one. It only took four weeks to build.
Rats didn't gain weight from sugar at the end of four weeks. Rats were put back on their normal diet. The rats' sensitivity to sweetness was restored after four weeks of testing.
That could be positive news for us. If you cut out sugar and eat a lot of it, you can get back your taste.
Dus says that this result was somewhat anticipated. The taste system is plastic and can recover from drug treatments that disrupt it.
The group was able to explain why this might be happening. Rats have taste buds in their tongues, but they didn't see a change in the structure of their taste buds. It makes sense that they would have discovered changes to the rats' sensitivity to other tastes.
There were no changes to the number of taste buds on the tongue. Rats given a high-sugar diet had fewer cells that detected sweetness.
The activity of cells that receive sweet information in the brain will be examined in future studies. Dus has found that lower sweet sensation in flies reduces the release of dopamine and causes people to eat more. Is this happening in the rat as well?
There is a lot of evidence about the effects of sugar and fat on dopamine and the food learning systems in the brain of humans and mammals. Is it the changes in our senses that cause them?
The best evidence that a high-sugar diet is changing the sensory system is found in mammals. This could affect your choices. Your metabolism could be affected by this.
If your taste system is plastic, it is likely that if we reformulate foods to contain less sugar, our taste buds will learn to eat and like the food.
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