Eva Cad arrives the terrace on the campus in Wageningen with emeritus professor Kees de Graaf, who did his half life research into taste and eating behavior. A day later, CAD will be promoted to the congenital sweet taste of people, and she shows in her dissertation what De Graaf has always said, now again: “Sweet is not addictive, you don’t want to eat more and more.” As a promoter, he is delighted that Eva could show it so beautifully with a great experiment.
The count goes in again, CAD orders a cappuccino – a little sweet, from the lactose in the milk. Another day, then she has to defend her dissertation, but she is not nervous. “There are probably questions about the biological importance of sweet,” and she can answer them. Simply put: sweet is a signal for energy in food. That is why children are such sweet tooth; They need a lot of energy to grow. You have to learn to appreciate Bitter and Sour, the preference for sweet is congenital.
Eva Cad (33) studied dietetics in Slovenia and gradually discovered that she found the science behind it more interesting than working with patients. When she was once in the Netherlands on vacation, she was charmed by the people and the open culture, and decided to look for a master’s program here. “Then you will soon end up in Wageningen.”
The question that kept her increasingly busy was: why do people eat what they eat? What does they eat too much? And what role does sweet play in this? Does the human preference for sweet – whether it comes from sugar or sweeteners – thick? Can you also unlearn that preference, and is that the way to combat obesity?
People respond differently to salt than sweet
If you just eat less sweet for a while, your taste changes automatically and you automatically start eating less sweet, you often hear. “That assumption is also behind the call from health organizations to make food less sweet and to use fewer sweeteners.” But although sweet food is often high -calorie, research so far showed no clear connection between exposure, preference and over -consumption of sweet. Unlike salt, which has been shown that you will find it less tasty if you use less of it.
CAD had expected, or perhaps hoped, that less exposure would do with preference. “In any case, we wanted to be sure that if we didn’t see any effect, it would not be a mistake in the design of the study.” She tackled it thoroughly: 180 people received six months of breakfast, lunch and snacks delivered to your home – half of what they ate about a day. One group received products with barely sugar and sweeteners, one group received a normal amount of sweet, and the third group received a package with extra sweet foods every week. In order to make it look like normal life as much as possible, they were allowed to know how much they ate.
In advance, CAD and her colleagues tested the degree of sweetness people the tastiest; The sweet tooth were immediately distributed over the groups. Because it is known that people make a lot of mistakes if they keep track of what they eat, the participants were asked several times: what did you eat yesterday? In addition, they also did urine tests for checking.
It wasn’t surprising CAD when she saw that most people love sweet – not too much and not too little – and that that preference is quite stable. But what she thought was remarkable: “The group that got little sweet, really reduced the intake of Zoet. The extra sweet group consumed slightly more sweet than the other two groups, but not as much as we expected. So there is a limit to how many sweet people like.”
And important: afterwards everyone quickly ate as sweet as before the intervention. “If it was true that you can change your preference due to another exposure, you would expect that the sweet group continued to eat extra sweet even afterwards. That did not happen.”
But is six months enough to change the sweet taste? People often need a year to learn a healthy eating pattern. “Head formation can indeed take a long time, a diet is complex. But studies on salt and fat show that three to four months is enough to change preferences.”
Desire
You can no longer resist the cake of cake, you can think, you never learn it. But it is not that deterministic now, says Cad. “You can like cheesecake better than cottage cheese, but still choose cottage cheese for health reasons.” Not only preference, also genes, upbringing, culture, supply and countless other factors determine what you eat.
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The question is also from when preference for sweet is fixed. CAD is curious if you can still adjust in the first years of life by having children eat less sweet. As she also wants to know why some people love less than others.
What Eva Cad is convinced of: “It is easier to change the food environment than people’s behavior. Energy density is one of the main causes of over -consumption. Industry can do something about it.”
And in the meantime do not blame people’s sweet preference if they are overweight. “The sweet tooth in our research ate no more than the people without Sweet tooth. It is misleading to say that you can unlearn the preference for sweet. Then people who try only get disappointed. “