Abstract
It is currently unclear whether changes in sweet taste perception of model systems after sleep curtailment extend to complex food matrices. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to use a novel solid oat-based food (crisps) and oat-based beverage stimulus sweetened with sucralose to assess changes in taste perception after sleep curtailment. Forty-one participants recorded a habitual and curtailed night of sleep using a single-channel electroencephalograph. The next morning, overall sweetness, flavor, and texture liking responses to energy- and nutrient-matched oat products across five concentrations of sweetness were measured. Overall (p = 0.047) and flavor (p = 0.017) liking slopes across measured concentrations were steeper after curtailment, suggesting that sweeter versions of the oat products were liked more after sleep curtailment. Additionally, a hierarchical cluster analysis was used to classify sweet likers and non-likers. While the effect of sleep curtailment on sweet liking did not differ between sweet liking classification categories, sleep curtailment resulted in decreased texture liking in the solid oat crisps for sweet non-likers (p < 0.001), but not in the oat beverage. These findings illustrate the varied effects of sleep on hedonic response in complex food matrices and possible mechanisms by which insufficient sleep can lead to sensory-moderated increases in energy intake.
Highlights
There is a growing body of evidence that insufficient sleep can alter taste perception
Changes in hedonic responses to both sucralose solutions and sucralose-sweetened oat products were observed after sleep curtailment
The sweet liking slope was not significantly increased, but the preferred sucralose concentration was increased after sleep curtailment
Summary
There is a growing body of evidence that insufficient sleep can alter taste perception. In the context of complex food, research suggests two important effects of insufficient sleep that could alter perception: impaired sensory neural processing [28,29] and increased somatosensory sensitivity [30]. The main objective of this study was to evaluate changes in hedonic response to two complex sucralose-sweetened foods across a range of sweetness levels after a habitual and curtailed night of sleep and to compare these responses to a model system consisting of sucralose solutions. While it was expected that changes in patterns of sweetness liking would agree with our previous findings that showed that sleep curtailment increased the rate of liking as sweetener concentration increased, it was hypothesized that the change in pattern would be more pronounced when tasting “real” foods instead of sweetener solutions due to altered processing of multi-modal sensory information. It was expected that SLP would not moderate changes in hedonic perception of food after sleep curtailment, in accordance with previous work [21]
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