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FAQ: How Hunger and Non-Nutritive Sweeteners Affect Sweet Taste Preference
A new study reveals that hunger amplifies the immediate liking and physiological arousal triggered by sweetness itself, not specifically by calories. It also shows that habitual consumers of non-nutritive sweeteners exhibit heightened activity in a brain region linked to self-control when tasting sweet solutions.
The study found that hunger increases the liking and physiological arousal (e.g., increased heart rate) triggered by sweetness itself, regardless of whether the sweetness comes from sugar or non-nutritive sweeteners. Additionally, habitual consumers of non-nutritive sweeteners showed stronger brain activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region linked to self-control.
Excessive sugar intake is a major driver of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Understanding how hunger and long-term use of non-nutritive sweeteners shape sweet taste preferences and brain responses can inform strategies to reduce sugar consumption.
They used subjective ratings, emotional assessments, electrocardiogram (ECG) to measure heart rate, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain activity in the prefrontal cortex. Participants tasted sweetness-matched solutions under both hungry and satiated conditions.
No. Hunger boosted the liking of all sweet solutions equally, whether they contained sugar or non-nutritive sweeteners. The craving for energy made sweetness itself more appealing, not the calories behind it.
Habitual non-nutritive sweetener consumers showed significantly stronger oxygenated hemoglobin responses in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) when tasting sweet solutions, indicating enhanced cognitive control or self-regulation during sweet taste processing.
The study was published in the journal Food Quality and Safety on May 20, 2026, by researchers from Jiangnan University in China and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
The findings suggest that long-term use of non-nutritive sweeteners may be associated with enhanced prefrontal surveillance during sweet taste processing, potentially reflecting a learned cognitive strategy to manage sweet cravings. This could inform the design of effective sugar-reduction strategies.
The study's emotion analysis using CATA (check-all-that-apply) involved a relatively small sample of 15 participants per group, so those findings should be interpreted with caution.