Abstract
Short sleep duration increases preferences for high-carbohydrate and high-fat foods. It is unclear if insufficient sleep-induced changes in food preference are mediated by changes in taste perception and if these changes are related to sweetener type (sucrose or sucralose) or sweet liking phenotype. The primary objective of this study was to determine if sleep curtailment results in changes in sweet taste perception after sleep curtailment. Forty participants used a single-channel electroencephalograph to record both a habitual and curtailed night (33% reduction) of sleep at home. The following morning, multiple dimensions of sweet taste perception were measured, including preferred sweetener concentrations, patterns of sweet liking, and intensity perception over a range of concentrations. After curtailment, a significant increase in preferred concentration for both sucrose and sucralose (p < 0.001 for both) was observed. The slope of sucrose sweet liking increased after curtailment (p = 0.001). The slope of sucralose liking also increased, but this was not significant (p = 0.129). Intensity perception of the sweeteners was not altered by curtailment. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to classify participants by sweet liking phenotype. Phenotypes were found to predict preferred sweetener concentration. These findings illustrate a possible need to control for sleep in food sensory studies and suggest a potential mechanism by which insufficient sleep can lead to excess energy intake.
Highlights
40% of US adults report habitually sleeping less than the recommended 7 h per night [1], a proportion that has been steadily rising across all age groups since the 1980s [2]
Anthropometric measurements as well as PSQI, General Food Craving Questionnaire–Trait version (G-FCQ-T) and Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) scores were not correlated with preferred sucrose or sucralose concentration and were not utilized in further analysis (p > 0.05)
While it was hypothesized that there would be a shift in liking so that all levels of sweetness would show an increased hedonic response after a night of sleep curtailment, the findings suggest a more complex relationship where the pattern of liking was altered so that the slope of the best-fit linear function of the hedonic response–concentration plot became significantly steeper after sleep curtailment
Summary
40% of US adults report habitually sleeping less than the recommended 7 h per night [1], a proportion that has been steadily rising across all age groups since the 1980s [2]. Several recent studies suggest that hedonic drivers of food intake may predominate when sleep is insufficient [13,14,15,16,17]. When a meal is provided to minimize caloric deficit after sleep curtailment, individuals maintain an increased desire for excess intake from snacks [20], suggesting that changes in food reward processing after curtailment are not driven exclusively by hunger. Based on previous observational work reporting correlations between sleep duration and sweetness perception [22,23], the primary objective of the current study was to determine if Nutrients 2019, 11, 2015; doi:10.3390/nu11092015 www.mdpi.com/journal/nutrients
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