Sugars are sweet and palatable. Sweetness is detected by the neural system, whereas palatability may be detected within the neural and chemical systems in the brain. Sweetness is discriminated from other tastes by different receptor sites on taste bud cells, a different subset of fibers in the taste nerves, and different projection zones in the brain. The benzodiazepine and opioid systems are r...

The objective of this study was to evaluate sire breed effect on mineral concentration in beef longissimus thoracis (LT) and investigate the correlations between beef mineral concentrations and carcass and palatability traits. Steer progeny (N=246) from the Germplasm Evaluation project-Cycle VIII were used in this study. In addition to carcass traits, LT was evaluated for mineral concentrations...

Peripheral transection of the sensory branches of the trigeminal nerve in rats unbalanced palatability, selectively reducing the ingestive actions elicited by preferred tastes but leaving unchanged the aversive actions elicited by unpreferred tastes. The reduction in the number of positive ingestive actions occurred even though the capacity to emit these actions remained unimpaired. These findi...

Retained heterosis for meat traits was estimated in F3 generation castrate males in three composite populations of beef cattle finished on two levels of dietary energy density (2.82 Mcal of ME and 3.07 Mcal of ME and 11.50% CP) and serially slaughtered at four end points at intervals of 20 to 22 d. Breed effects were evaluated in nine parental breeds (Red Poll [R], Hereford [H], Angus [A], Limo...

Food palatability and hedonic value play central roles in nutrient intake. However, postingestive effects can influence food preferences independently of palatability, although the neurobiological bases of such mechanisms remain poorly understood. Of central interest is whether the same brain reward circuitry that is responsive to palatable rewards also encodes metabolic value independently of ...

Consumption of foods results in a transient reduction in hedonic value that influences the extent and nature of feeding behavior. The time course of this effect, however, is poorly specified. In an initial experiment, using an analysis of the microstructure of licking in mice we found that consumption of sucrose led to a rapid reduction in lick cluster size, a measure of palatability, which rec...

Evidence indirectly implicates the amygdala as the primary processor of emotional information used by cortex to drive appropriate behavioral responses to stimuli. Taste provides an ideal system with which to test this hypothesis directly, as neurons in both basolateral amygdala (BLA) and gustatory cortex (GC)-anatomically interconnected nodes of the gustatory system-code the emotional valence o...

In a laboratory experiment seedlings of 24 perennial herbaceous prairie species were offered to the omnivorous cricket Acheta domestica in an extended feeding trial. Leaf damage was monitored daily allowing an index of palatability to be calculated for each plant species. The index of palatability successfully predicted relative abundance within the same set of species in an independently-condu...

Central insulin is thought to act at the neural interface between metabolic and hedonic drives to eat. Here, using pharmacological fMRI, we show that intranasal insulin (INI) changes the value of food cues through modulation of mesolimbic pathways. Overnight fasted participants rated the palatability of food pictures and attractiveness of non-food items (control) after receiving INI or placebo....