Obesity is a major public health problem. Palatability (i.e., the reinforcing value of food, derived from orosensory cues) is a significant factor in determining food intake and contributes to increased consumption leading to obesity. The nucleus accumbens is a ventral striatal region that is important for both appetitive and consummatory behaviors and has been implicated in modulating palatabi...

The traditional view of palatability was that it reflected some underlying nutritional deficit and was part of a homeostatically driven motivational system. However, this idea does not fit with the common observation that palatability can lead to short-term overconsumption. Here, we attempt to re-evaluate the basis of palatability, first by reviewing the role of salt-need both in the expression...

Evaluation of eating quality in early breeding generations of rice is critical to developing varieties with better palatability. This paper reports DNA markers associated with eating quality of temperate japonica rice and an evaluation method aided by multiple regression analysis. A total of 30 markers comprising STSs, SNPs, and SSRs were tested for their association with palatability using 22 ...

The present study explored the possibility of generating a novel sensory evaluation instrument for describing comprehensive food palatability via its subdomains (rewarding, cultural, and informational) while keeping physiological factors constant. Seventy-five Japanese participants were asked to taste cheese samples and to respond to a questionnaire that was developed to dissect the distinct su...

It generally is assumed that a common neural substrate mediates both the palatability and the reward value of nutritive events. However, recent evidence suggests this assumption may not be true. Whereas opioid circuitry in both the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum has been reported to mediate taste-reactivity responses to palatable events, the assignment of reward or inventive value to go...

Pork loins (n = 72) were selected so that marbling scores would range from "practically devoid" to "abundant" in the longissimus muscle. Loin chops were cooked and rated by a trained six-member sensory panel. Physical and chemical characteristics were stratified according to marbling level (divided into 10 subclasses), muscle structure, shear force, overall palatability, and juiciness (each div...

Typically, stimulus batteries used to characterize sensory neural coding span physical parameter spaces (e.g., concentration: from low to high). For awake animals, however, psychological variables (e.g., pleasantness/palatability) with complicated relationships to the physical often dominate neural responses. Here we pit physical and psychological axes against one another, presenting awake rats...

Benzodiazepine agonists stimulate feeding in animals. This paper reviews evidence which indicates that benzodiazepine-induced feeding is due to a specific enhancement of the perceived palatability of food and fluids, and is not a mere secondary consequence of anxiety reduction. In studies of the effect of benzodiazepines on affective reactions that are naturally elicited from rats by tastes, we...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate quantitatively the taste of the various total enteral nutrients marketed in Japan using human gustatory sensation tests and an artificial taste sensor. In the human gustatory sensation test, four basic taste intensities (sweetness, saltiness, sourness, and bitterness), as well as 15 kinds of palatability scales, were evaluated according to the semantic ...