A six-month trial has found that eating less sweet-tasting food did not make people like sweetness any less. It also did not produce meaningful differences in the health measures researchers tracked, including body weight and blood and urine markers tied to heart disease and diabetes risk.
The study, published by researchers at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands and Bournemouth University in the UK, looked at 180 participants split into high-, low- and average-sweetness diet groups. One month, three months and six months into the trial, they were asked whether their liking for sweet foods or their sense of sweetness had changed. It did not.
That finding matters because reducing sweet-tasting foods has long been folded into public-health advice aimed at overweight and obesity. But in this trial, the food itself came in different forms of sweetness, from sugar to naturally occurring sweetness and low-calorie sweeteners, and the outcome was the same: people who ate more sweet-tasting foods did not seem to develop a stronger preference, and people who ate fewer did not seem to lose theirs.
Katherine Appleton said the results do not support advice to cut sweetness in diets altogether, and she argued that such guidance misses an important distinction between sugar, low-calorie sweeteners and natural sources of sweetness. That point cuts to the practical question behind the research: if reducing sweetness alone does not change taste or the measured health markers, then the advice has been aiming at the wrong target.
The researchers also found that participants tended to drift back to their previous levels of sweet food consumption after the study ended, which suggests the trial changed little beyond the six months it lasted. That leaves a clear gap for anyone hoping to use diet advice to reshape cravings over time. The evidence from this trial points instead toward sugar intake and energy-dense foods, not sweetness itself, as the more likely places for public-health guidance to focus.
