Patterns of Sweet Taste Liking: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Two distinct patterns of sweet taste liking have been described: one showing a peak liking response in the mid-range of sucrose concentrations and the other showing a monotonic liking response at progressively higher sucrose concentrations. Classification of these patterns has been somewhat arbitrary. In this report, we analyzed patterns of sweet taste liking in a pilot study with 26 adults including 14 women and 12 men, 32.6 ± 14.5 years of age with body mass index 26.4 ± 5.1 kg/m2 (mean ± SD). Sweet taste liking was measured for 10 levels of sucrose solutions (0.035 M to 1.346 M). Participants rated their liking of each solution using a visual analog scale with 0 indicating strongly disliking and 100 strongly liking. The cluster analysis demonstrated two distinct groups: 13 liked relatively low sucrose concentrations and liked high sucrose concentrations less, and 13 liked high sucrose concentrations greatly. If we use the 0.598 M sucrose solution alone and a cutoff liking score of 50, we can distinguish the two clusters with high sensitivity (100%) and specificity (100%). If validated in additional studies, this simple tool may help us to better understand eating behaviors and the impact of sweet taste liking on nutrition-related disorders.

Effects of Sweet-Liking on Body Composition Depend on Age and Lifestyle: A Challenge to the Simple Sweet-Liking—Obesity Hypothesis

“…That is, individuals of normal weight experienced stronger pleasure from high sweetness relative to those overweight or with obesity. In contrast, the more recent literature has failed to show any significant relationships [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. Accordingly, we might speculate that recruiting participants of a broad range of ages (i.e., 18-65 years) without accounting for the effect of the exposure to the obesogenic environment may have attenuated links between hedonic responses to sweetness and anthropometric outcomes.…”

“…Regarding the role of age in the relation between sweet-liking patterns and obesity, other researchers have also found some age-dependent variation in BMI, although these differences failed to reach significance. For example, in Methven et al (2016) [33] and Asao et al (2015) [29], SLs had~3 units greater BMI than SDs, with participants of a median and mean age of 26 and 32 years, respectively.…”

“…Critically for the present context, data from studies on affective responses to sweetness have had inconsistent findings with regard to obesity. Some studies report no significant relationship [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] while others suggest individuals with overweight or obesity experience less pleasure from high sweetness compared to normal-weight individuals [38][39][40][41][42][43]. To better understand reasons for these conflicting reports, a critical consideration is the classification methods used to identify distinct sweet-liking patterns (i.e., sweet-liking phenotypes).…”

“…Notably, studies using BMI diverse samples identify participants with obesity more often as SDs compared to those with normal-weight [38][39][40][41]43]. Conversely, datasets with truncated BMI ranges (mean BMI between 20.1 kg/m 2 and 27.2 kg/m 2 ) have either failed to find an effect of the sweet-liking phenotype on BMI [30][31][32]35,[49][50][51] or differences in BMI between phenotypes which failed to reach statistical significance [29,33,36,37]. To date, only one study in adults has investigated body composition as a function of sweet-liking, and they found no evidence of differences in body fat across liker phenotypes [31].…”

Patterns of sweetness preference in red wine according to consumer characterisation

“…Hedonic responses to one concentration of sugar (Kim et al, 2014;Saliba, Wragg, & Richardson, 2009) failed to reveal some features of liking patterns when compared to ratings across increasing concentrations (Kim et al, 2014). However, for rapid screening tests a single concentration may be used to separate between sweet likers and sweet dislikers (Asao et al, 2015).…”