Therefore, future research may be targeted towards new strategies to increase the sensitivity of sweet taste receptors in pre-diabetics and diabetics to obtain a desired sweet taste by consuming low concentrations of sugar.
For instance, people with Addison's disease, a rare disorder that causes a deficiency of stress hormones, experience dramatically heightened sensitivity to sweet and salt tastes.
The study, published last week in BioMed Central Neuroscience, found that sensitivity to sweet and salty tastes was greater after 16 hours without food than an hour after a meal.
A 2011 study found that consuming just two sugary drinks a day can dull our sensitivity to sweet tastes.
Disruption of GLP-1 signaling in mice causes a significantly decreased sensitivity to sweet tastants, and increased sensitivity to umami and sour tastants.
To score the questionnaire, one point was added for each of four questions when the subject indicated an abnormal sensitivity to sweet, sour, salty or bitter.
TRPM5 (Transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily M member 5), a taste-specific TRP ion channel, is coexpressed with T1R and T2R cells in taste buds, and mice deficient for Trpm5 exhibit abolished or severely reduced sensitivity to sweet, umami, and bitter stimuli (Zhang et al. 2003; Damak et al. 2006).
Psychobiologist Michael Tordoff of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia agrees, pointing out that lower sensitivity to sweets might lead a person to eat less sugar because it tastes bad--or more sugar, because they can't get enough.
Among the show's portraits are works of considerable sensitivity, including a sweet head of the 5-year-old Louis XIV by Jacques Sarazin.
"Our goal is to develop flavor molecules that will tweak the sensitivity of the sweet system but not be sweeteners, because if they become sweeteners they are no longer flavors," he told me.
Therefore, individual differences in bitter sensitivity may influence sweet intake, especially in children.
