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High Dietary Sugar Reshapes Taste to Promote Feeding Behavior in Fruit Flies (cell.com)
57 points by laurex on May 8, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



This is one epic study. Thanks.


What does an obese fly look like?


A bit clickbaity. "A high sugar diet decreases sweet taste sensation and blunted sweet taste promotes overconsumption and obesity", but that only applies to sugary stuff, and not to any kind of food; I'm sure it could apply to everything (like people who have to put too much salt in food because they've gotten used to it).


I'd assume that as well, though there is mentioned that Sucralose and fat doesn't have that effect:

"To probe whether taste deficits were due to high dietary sweetness, we examined the taste responses of animals fed a sweet, non-caloric sucralose diet. However, taste responses to sucrose remained unchanged in these flies (Figure 1C, dark green) and there was no fat accumulation (Figure S1F). Similarly, flies fed a calorically dense (1.4 calories/gram as the 30% high sugar diet), but not sweet, lard-supplemented diet accumulated fat (Figure S1G, lime green), but had normal taste responses (Figure 1C), indicating that sweetness or excessive calories alone are insufficient to lower sweet taste sensation. In contrast, only sweet and nutritious diets such as those supplemented with D-fructose, D-glucose, and sucrose promoted a decrease in sweet taste responses (Figure 1D)."




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