Yep! We looked at whether we are reducing people’s pleasure from eating sweet food, but the evidence suggests this shouldn’t be an issue—since our taste for sweetness is adaptive, and reducing sugar intake makes high sugar food taste too sweet even as low sugar food tastes sweeter than before. The upshot is that recalibrating everyone at lower levels of sugar will leave food tasting subjectively much the same over medium-to-long term.
This is in line with what is the case for salt, where the phenomena of desensitization also exists.
Just briefly skimmed, but I was wondering if the decreased happiness from the lesser consumption of crap was factored into the analysis.
Yep! We looked at whether we are reducing people’s pleasure from eating sweet food, but the evidence suggests this shouldn’t be an issue—since our taste for sweetness is adaptive, and reducing sugar intake makes high sugar food taste too sweet even as low sugar food tastes sweeter than before. The upshot is that recalibrating everyone at lower levels of sugar will leave food tasting subjectively much the same over medium-to-long term.
This is in line with what is the case for salt, where the phenomena of desensitization also exists.