Frontostriatal and behavioral adaptations to daily sugar-sweetened beverage intake: a randomized controlled trial.
Background:Current obesity theories suggest that the repeated intake of highly palatable high-sugar foods causes adaptions in the striatum, parietal lobe, and prefrontal and visual cortices in the brain that may serve to perpetuate consumption in a feed-forward manner. However, the data for humans are cross-sectional and observational, leaving little ability to determine the temporal precedence of repeated consumption on brain response.Objective:We tested the impact of regular sugar-sweetened beverage intake on brain and behavioral responses to beverage stimuli.Design:We performed an experiment with 20 healthy-weight individuals who were randomly assigned to consume 1 of 2 sugar-sweetened beverages daily for 21 d, underwent 2 functional MRI sessions, and completed behavioral and explicit hedonic assessments.Results:Consistent with preclinical experiments, daily beverage consumption resulted in decreases in dorsal striatal response during receipt of the consumed beverage (r= -0.46) and decreased ventromedial prefrontal response during logo-elicited anticipation (r= -0.44). This decrease in the prefrontal response correlated with increases in behavioral disinhibition toward the logo of the consumed beverage (r= 0.54;P= 0.02). Daily beverage consumption also increased precuneus response to both juice logos compared with a tasteless control (r= 0.45), suggesting a more generalized effect toward beverage cues. Last, the repeated consumption of 1 beverage resulted in an explicit hedonic devaluation of a similar nonconsumed beverage (P< 0.001).Conclusions:Analogous to previous reports, these initial results provide convergent data for a role of regular sugar-sweetened beverage intake in altering neurobehavioral responses to the regularly consumed beverage that may also extend to other beverage stimuli. Future research is required to provide evidence of replication in a larger sample and to establish whether the neurobehavioral adaptations observed herein are specific to high-sugar and/or nonnutritive-sweetened beverages or more generally related to the repeated consumption of any type of food. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02624206.
Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Biomedical Research Imaging Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC kyle_burger@unc.edu.
Kyle S
0000-0001-6376-7514
KS
Burger
D000328:Adult; D001628:Beverages; D001835:Body Weight; D001921:Brain / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D004032:Diet; D019422:Dietary Sucrose / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000494:pharmacology*; D002149:Energy Intake; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D005260:Female; D005515:Food Labeling; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009765:Obesity / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology; D012016:Reference Values; D013549:Sweetening Agents / Q000494:pharmacology; D013649:Taste / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
D019422:Dietary Sucrose; D013549:Sweetening Agents
dorsal striatum; fMRI; habit-based decision making; obesity; reward; sugar-sweetened beverage; ventromedial prefrontal cortex