How Diet Can Change The Way Sugar Tastes – ScienceBlog.com

The taste of sweetness is highly subjective. Photo: Pixabay

The food animals eat can change how they perceive future food. This response uses the same machinery that the brain uses to learn, new research has found.Researchers at the University of Sydney have discovered the basic science of how sweet taste perception is fine-tuned in response to different diets. While it has long been known that food can taste different based on previous experience, until now we didn’t know the molecular pathways that controlled this effect.

Professor Greg Neely at the Charles Perkins Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences with Professor Qiaoping Wang (formerly at the Charles Perkins Centre and now based at Sun Yat-Sen University, China) used fruit flies to study sweet taste. They learned that taste is highly subjective based on previous experience.

Professor Neely said they learned four important things:

The food animals eat can change how they perceive future food.
This response uses the same machinery that the brain uses to learn.
Pathways that can extend lifespan were also involved in enhancing taste perception, and diets in fruit flies that promote long life were also found to enhance taste perception.
Lifespan, learning and sensory perception are linked in ways we are just starting to understand.

Fruit fly ‘tongue’

“We found that the fruit fly ‘tongue’ – taste sensors on its proboscis and front feet – can learn things using the same molecular pathways that the fly brain uses to learn things,” Professor Neely said. “Central to this is the neurotransmitter dopamine.”

“It turns out these are also the same chemical pathways that humans use to learn and remember all sorts of things,” Professor Neely said. “This really highlights how learning is a whole-body phenomenon; and was a complete surprise to us.”[…]