In rats, high-sugar diets lower the ability of the taste system to sense sweetness. However, curbing high sugar in the diet allowed sensitivity to sweetness to return.
Sweet tasting foods don't only trigger the taste buds, they also switch on a neurological pathway that begins in the gut. In the intestines, signals of sugar ingestion travel to the brain, sparking an appetite for more sweet foods. However, this pathway only responds to sugars, not artificial sweeteners.
SatB2PBN-expressing neurons in the parabrachial nucleus play a key role in processing and encoding sweet tastes. The SatB2PBN neurons relay sweet taste signals from the gustatory thalamus to the cortex in mouse models.
