Seventy patients with Crohn's disease, 50 with ulcerative colitis, and 58 control subjects were questioned about their sugar consumption, measurements were made of their taste acuity, and blood levels of various trace elements including zinc and selenium were estimated. Sugar consumption was significantly increased in Crohn's disease (p less than 0.01). There was only a minor reduction in taste...

Nonreinforced exposure to a cue tends to attenuate subsequent conditioning with that cue-an effect referred to as latent inhibition (LI). In the two experiments reported here, we examined LI effects in the context of conditioned taste aversion by examining both the amount of consumption and the microstructure of the consummatory behavior (in terms of the mean size of lick clusters). The latter ...

After food consumption, the motivation to eat (wanting) decreases and associated brain reward responses change. Wanting-related brain responses and how these are affected by consumption of specific foods are ill documented. Moreover, the predictive value of food-induced brain responses for subsequent consumption has not been assessed. We aimed to determine the effects of consumption of sweet an...

Early adopters of unfamiliar, but nutritious foods can do so because of a combination of taste-motivations and health-motivations. Yet because taste can provide an enduring motivation for dietary change, profiling the taste-motivated segment of a particular food might prove useful in identifying and stimulating adoption among similar predisposed segments. This manuscript describes a basic quali...

Little is known about avian taste perception and how taste affects food choice. We designed a study to determine the concentrations of aqueous solutions of common chemical taste stimuli that result in altered consumption patterns. Using two-choice taste-preference tests, we studied the taste thresholds of caged cockatiels (Nymphicus hollandicus) for aqueous solutions of potassium chloride, a ph...

Recognition memory is the ability to assert the familiarity of things previously encountered. In the case of food, when an animal encounters a new taste, it hesitates to eat it, showing a reduced consumption—a neophobic response. However, when the new taste has no negative consequences, it becomes recognized as a safe signal, leading to an increase in its consumption (attenuation of neophobia)....

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 base many of their food choices on familiarity and sweet taste. The low cost and ready availability of energy-containing sweeten...

Because overconsumption of food contributes to ill health, understanding what affects how much people eat is of importance. The 'bogus' taste test is a measure widely used in eating behaviour research to identify factors that may have a causal effect on food intake. However, there has been no examination of the validity of the bogus taste test as a measure of food intake. We conducted a partici...

Sensory responses to the taste, smell, and texture of foods help determine food preferences and eating habits. However, sensory responses alone do not predict food consumption. The view that a "sweet tooth" leads to obesity through excess sugar consumption is overly narrow. In reality, there are multiple links between taste perceptions, taste preferences, food preferences, and food choices and ...

In the behaving rat, the consumption of an unfamiliar taste activates the extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1-2 (ERK1-2) in the insular cortex, which contains the taste cortex. In contrast, consumption of a familiar taste has no effect. Furthermore, activation of ERK1-2, culminating in modulation of gene expression, is obligatory for the encoding of long-term, but not short-term, memory of ...