One widely cited model of how humans acquire liking for different foods is flavour-nutrient learning, where associations between the orosensory properties of the ingested food or drink (the flavour CS) and positive consequences of nutrient ingestion (the UCS) leads to acquired liking for the flavour (flavour-nutrient hedonic learning: FNL-H). Likewise, an association between the CS and the post-ingestive effects of ingested nutrients has been suggested to lead to learning about how satiating a particular food is (flavour-nutrient satiety learning: FNSH).However, whereas there is evidence for both FNL-H and FNL-S in experimental studies with non-human animals, evidence in humans is less convincing, with many failures to find the predicted changes in liking, preference or intake following repeated flavour-nutrient pairings.The present short review considers how subtle differences in experimental design might underlie this inconsistency, and identifies key design features which appear to increase the likelihood of success in human flavour-nutrient learning studies. Key factors include CS novelty, the level of nutrients ingested during training, the appetitive state of the consumer and individual consumer characteristics. A further complication is competition between FNL-H and FNL-S, and with other associations such as flavour-flavour learning. From this it is possible to make important inferences about the nature of human flavour-nutrient learning which firstly suggest that it has important similarities to that seen in other species, but secondly that the laboratory investigations of both FNL-H and FNL-S in humans can be compromised by subtle but important variations in experimental design.
Running Head:Human flavour nutrient learning
Key terms:Flavour, conditioning, learning, nutrients 3 4 Humans and other animals, in particular omnivores, have a remarkable ability to identify which of the almost endless supply of potential foods in are environment are nutritious and worth consuming and which are poisonous and so should be avoided. However, as described in the Omnivore's Paradox [1], humans are not born with a pre-set menu of preferred foods, but instead have to learn what is safe and nutritious by balancing neophobia and inquisitivity.Arguably the only component of our food preferences that appears to reflect an innate like is the case of a general preference for sweet tastes in humans and other species [2]. But evidence that not all humans do like sweet tastes [3] implies that even our initial liking for sweet tastes can be modified by experience, in line with reversal of an aversion to bitter tastes when the bitterness predicts a benefit, as is the case with caffeinated products [4].So how then do humans acquire liking for nutrient-rich foods? Historically, many different models for how humans acquire liking for novel flavours have been proposed [5,6] but in this brief review only one model, flavour-nutrient hedonic learning (FNL-H), will be considered as many have implied that this is likely to be the ...