title: Sensory-specific satiety is intact in rats made obese on a high-fat high-sugar choice diet.
abstract: Sensory-specific satiety (SSS) is the temporary decreased pleasantness of a recently eaten food, which inhibits further eating. Evidence is currently mixed whether SSS is weaker in obese people, and whether such difference precedes or follows from the obese state. Animal models allow testing whether diet-induced obesity causes SSS impairment. Female rats (n = 24) were randomly assigned to an obesogenic high-fat, high-sugar choice diet or chow-only control. Tests of SSS involved pre-feeding a single palatable, distinctively-flavored food (cheese- or cocoa-flavored) prior to free choice between both foods. Rats were tested for short-term SSS (2 h pre-feeding immediately followed by 2 h choice) and long-term SSS (3 day pre-feeding prior to choice on day 4). In both short- and long-term tests rats exhibited SSS by shifting preference towards the food not recently eaten. SSS was not impaired in obese rats. On the contrary, in the long-term tests they showed stronger SSS than controls. This demonstrates that neither the obese state nor a history of excess energy consumption fundamentally causes impaired SSS in rats. The putative impaired SSS in obese people may instead reflect a specific predisposition, properties of the obesogenic diet, or history of restrictive dieting and bingeing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Programs in Animal Behavior and Neuroscience, Bucknell University, USA. Electronic address: kmyers@bucknell.edu.
authors.forename: Kevin P
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: Myers
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001835:Body Weight; D002755:Choice Behavior; D004032:Diet / Q000009:adverse effects / Q000523:psychology*; D059305:Diet, High-Fat; D004041:Dietary Fats / Q000009:adverse effects; D000073417:Dietary Sugars / Q000009:adverse effects; D004435:Eating; D002149:Energy Intake; D005260:Female; D005518:Food Preferences / Q000523:psychology*; D009765:Obesity / Q000523:psychology*; D057181:Pleasure; D011897:Random Allocation; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D012527:Satiation; D012528:Satiety Response; D013649:Taste; D055697:Taste Perception
chemical_list: D004041:Dietary Fats; D000073417:Dietary Sugars
keywords: Animal model; Diet-induced obesity; Food choice; Habituation; Sensory-specific satiety; Taste preferences