Field Notes

Sugar Signaling Pathway May Help Design More Healthful Foods and Beverages

Most everyone understands that a major role of our sense of taste is to inform us when sugar is present in foods and beverages by eliciting sweetness on our tongues. A study led by the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, published in PLOS One, identifies a new human sensory ability to detect sugars in the mouth with a molecular calorie detector, of sorts.

“Our mouth can identify when a sweetener has the potential to deliver calories vs a noncaloric sweetener, which cannot,” says first author Paul Breslin, PhD, a Monell investigator and a professor of nutritional sciences at Rutgers University.

The paper describes the first-in-human demonstration of a signaling pathway that uses glucose to signal the presence of calories, in addition to the well-studied sweet-taste receptor in taste buds.

Glucose comprises about one-half of the commercial sugar sweeteners used today. Over millennia, humans have derived glucose in their diet from such sugar-rich foods as fruits and honey, and today from added sugars, such as sucrose (table sugar) from sugar beets or sugar cane and high-fructose corn syrup.

“Humans love fruit and sugar, as do many other apes, which obtain most of their calories from sugar,” Breslin says.

Spurred by recent data from Monell that showed taste bud cells in mice could identify when a sweetener has calories to burn for energy, the current team examined whether the ability to sense glucose in the human mouth also may involve this additional pathway. The team asked if this calorie detector is functional, and, perhaps most importantly, affects our responses to sugar in our diet.

“Now that we know this calorie-detecting taste system is operating in humans, it could help explain the overall preference for sugared beverages over noncaloric sweetener beverages,” Breslin says.

In a series of three human-taste experiments, the team compared oral glucose sensitivity with the ability to sense the artificial sweetener sucralose and with a special form of glucose that can’t be metabolized. “Overall, there are two sweet-sensing pathways in the mouth: one for sweet taste, and another for detecting potential energy-burning sugars,” says coauthor Linda J. Flammer, PhD, a senior research associate at Monell.

Breslin, an experimental psychologist interested in human oral perception and its genetic basis, has long been perplexed by diet sodas never capturing a major share of the beverage market. He now has the start of an answer: “Diet drinks are not as satisfying as sugared beverages. As a public health initiative, might we get beverages and foods with lower sugar levels to be more rewarding? Now that we know there’s this second glucose-sensing system in the mouth, maybe we can tap into it to make healthier beverages that people enjoy drinking.”

After swallowing, calories in sugars are sensed in the gut and blood, but this study establishes that humans also can register sugars as being different from noncaloric sweeteners in the mouth. “It’s remarkable that we evolved a mechanism not only to taste oral sugars as sweet but also to sense that they have a metabolic or caloric signal,” Breslin says. “This means that the mouth is much smarter than we realized and that it will be difficult to trick it by simply providing noncaloric sweeteners.”

— Source: Monell Chemical Senses Center

 

Family-Centered Nutrition for Children With Autism

Adapting family-centered nutrition programs can positively influence diet behaviors in children with autism, according to a study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the most common developmental disabilities in children. Because many children with autism also have obesity, researchers evaluated the adaptation and implementation of an existing, evidence-based nutrition program for children with autism and their parents.

“Historically, children with autism have been excluded from this type of programming often designed for neurotypical kids. We know that children with autism face greater challenges. One of these challenges is that they often have two to five times the rate of obesity than other kids. So, we wanted to help this population that often lacks these specialized resources,” says Brenda Manzanarez, MS, RD, of the Diabetes and Obesity Program at the Center for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Children aged 7 to 12 with autism and their parents participated in six weekly, 90-minute classes attended by the whole family as part of the Kids N Fitness program developed at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Each class was structured around four core elements: family-centered nutrition education, parent support, physical activity, and goal setting.

“We had trained staff that delivered the curriculum along with applied behavior analyst therapists who provided support and feedback on how we could improve the curriculum. At the end of the sessions, we found it challenging to keep up the retention of families, with about 26% completing the program. Interestingly, we found that those who did complete the entire program did have 100% attendance,” Manzanarez says. “The families voiced that they liked the program and seeing changes in their kids like improving their eating habits, being more positive, and engaging in exercise as a form of movement.”

Families reported valuing the opportunity to ask questions and share successful experiences and approaches to increase their child’s healthful food repertoire. Upon completing participation in the pilot, families reported that their children were more willing to try new foods, proactively added colorful foods to their plate during mealtimes, and expressed greater interest in exercise. In addition, the curriculum seemed to resonate with child participants, as documented by both staff and parents, who noted that children recalled main messages from previous weeks’ lessons.

The increasing prevalence of ASD and childhood obesity merits innovative interventions involving the whole family. Family-based community programs that address problematic mealtime behaviors and provide family-centered nutrition education may prove an important adjunct or alternative to more time- and resource-intensive one-on-one interventions, such as traditional feeding therapies. As children with ASD often are excluded from traditional learning settings, findings from this pilot can contribute to the development of evidence-based practices of community-based nutrition interventions for children with ASD and their families.

— Source: Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior