The trick to temper your sweet tooth by temporarily cutting down on sugar and sweeteners does not seem to work after all. A large-scale Wageningen study shows that people who followed a low-sweetness diet for six months remained just as fond of sweet flavours as before. Those who consumed extra-sweet foods did not grow to like sweet flavours more. âOur sweet taste preference turns out to be more stubborn than thought,â concludes PhD student Eva Äad.
The internet is full of tips for âresettingâ your preference for sweetness: avoid sweet foods and drinks, and supposedly your cravings for sugary treats will fade. But scientific evidence for this is scarce. Therefore, Äad designed a long-term intervention study involving 180 participants. Over six months, they received home-delivered breakfasts, lunches and snacks containing either a high, low or an average amount of sweet products. These included products sweetened with sugar and sweeteners. For example, the low-sweetness group received plain yoghurt and savoury pepper spreads, while the high-sweetness group got fruity yoghurt and sweetened peanut butter. The moderate group had a mix of both.
Before, during and after the study, participants took part in detailed taste tests involving products such as cake, custard and lemonade, each offered in five sweetness levels: from barely sweet to extremely sweet. The researchers asked how much the participants liked the products and how sweet they perceived them to be. Those ratings hardly changed throughout the study, regardless of diet. âI expected preferences to shift,â says Äad. âThat people who ate sweeter foods would grow to like sweeter products more, and vice versa. But that is not what we saw.â
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