Why We Eat Too Much: It’s The Calories, Not The Taste

Researchers at Yale have some surprising news for big eaters. We don’t keep eating because we like the taste; we keep eating because we crave the calories. It’s true. A Yale news release reports that researchers tested 14 participants to learn their preferences for flavors of novel drinks without calories.  Later, they added calories to one of the drinks in the form of an undetectable carbohydrate. The subjects consumed this flavored beverage and one without calories repeatedly over three weeks, while researchers measured the effect of consuming these drinks on blood glucose. Following this conditioning, researchers scanned the subjects’ brains as they sampled non-caloric versions of both flavored drinks. Correct. The participants liked the calorie-paired flavor. The team found that a change in blood glucose produced by drinking the flavor that had once contained calories strongly predicted responses in regions of the brain known to guide feeding. The researchers believe the preference for calories explains why eating — and over-eating — are often unrelated to how much a person likes the food. It also suggests that people with altered glucose metabolism, such as diabetes, will be more susceptible to food cues because they have increased glucose responses to food. Read more from Yale.