Effects of obesity and set point on taste responsiveness and ingestion in humans.

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the relationships among degree of obesity, nearness to set point for adipose tissue mass, and responsiveness to taste. In Experiment 1, subjects rated milkshakes varying in sweetness intensity. Overweight and normal weight subjects did not have significantly different detection thresholds or preference ratings. However, overweight subjects worked longer than normals to obtain their most preferred substance. Experiment 2 varied the ease of tasting the milkshake. Preference and food intake of moderately overweight subjects were significantly more influenced by tastes that they found positive and negative than was the preference of normal weight or obese subjects. The ease of ingesting the taste substance also significantly influenced preference and food intake of the moderately obese only. Nearness to set point, operationally denned as weight stability for 2 years, had no significant effects.The association between taste responsiveness and overweight has been widely demonstrated in both animals and humans. Animals with ventromedial hypothalamic lesions typically show greater responsiveness to the sensory qualities of their food than normal weight animals without lesions (Corbit & Stellar, 1964;Teitelbaum, 1955), although finickiness and obesity can occur independently (Graff & Stellar, 1962). The eating behavior of many varieties of genetically obese mice also appears highly influenced by taste (Bray & York, 1971;Fuller & Jacoby, 1955;Rytand, 1943). Similarly, overweight humans are highly responsive to the sensory qualities of food (Hashim & Van Itallie, 1965;Nisbett, 1968Nisbett, , 1972.Although these studies demonstrate a correlation between obesity and taste responsiveness, they do not consider to which component of taste the obese are differentially reactive and precisely how this influences food intake. Experiments designed to test the first aspect of this question for humans (Grinker, in press;Grinker, Hirsch, & Smith, 1972) examined judgments

Consciousness and Self-Regulation

“…Using externality scores standardized on the entire sample in each study, we did find, however, that when group averages were compared, moderately overweight subjects were more external than either the normals or the extremely obese. This finding was consistent from study to study and was true for palatability ratings of increasingly sweet-tasting glucose solutions (Rodin, Moskowitz, and Bray, 1976) and milk shakes (Rodin, 1975b); responsiveness to preloads of varying caloric density (Rodin, Moskowitz, and Bray, 1976), and eating and noneating responses to manipulations of external cue salience (Rodin, Slochower, and Fleming, 1977). Moderately overweight subjects also appeared most willing to work to obtain a highly preferred milk shake when permitted to sample it first.…”

Presidential Address-1974: From Explanation to Action in Psychosomatic Medicine: The Case of Obesity

“…On this basis he elaborated a popular theory ascribing overeating by obese persons to their "externality," or peculiar susceptibility to environmental cues. More recent work from other laboratories has failed to confirm this theory (63,66,73,95,96). The failures to replicate Schachter's earlier findings, however, seem to have arisen more from an unexpected responsiveness on the part of nonobese persons than from a lack of responsiveness on the part of the obese ones.…”

Effects of food form on appetite and energy intake in lean and obese young adults

“…There is a long history of research on potential differences in behavioral 40 and metabolic 41 responses to foods in the lean and obese that may account for their phenotypes.…”