Attention all coffee drinkers: If you have a sweeth tooth, your early morning pickmeup might be making it worse, reports Maura Judkis for the Washington Post.
Ms. Judkis writes:
If you’re frequently tempted to buy a treat from the pastry case at your favorite coffee shop, there’s a good reason – and it’s not just your lack of willpower. A new study on coffee published in the Journal of Food Science has found that caffeine can affect the way we perceive sweetness and may make us crave sweets more strongly.
The study indicates that caffeine makes sugar not taste as sweet – which means you want more of it to satisfy your taste buds.
[The study’s] finding means that the dulled palate for sweets “is a noticeable effect [of caffeine], and that [this effect] does stick around after you’ve finished consuming,” said Robin Dando, director of the Cornell Sensory Evaluation Facility and an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Food Science, who was a member of the research team [behind the study]. Because many people drink more than one cup of coffee, “this may have a cumulative effect to the day.”
All of this ascribes a more sinister meaning to the baked goods behind the glass at Starbucks
Dando’s previous research had already found that when you chemically block people’s ability to taste sweet flavors, it makes them crave more sugar and seek out higher-calorie treats. Based on his collective research, we now know that drinking a caffeinated cup of coffee, which has the same blocking effect, makes people want cookies or cake more than they otherwise would.
“It has always been coffee and doughnuts, or coffee and some type of sweet ... we’ve been doing this a long time, this link between sugar and coffee, but now we understand more of the mechanism,” said Lauri Wright, an assistant professor and director of the doctorate in clinical nutrition program at the University of North Florida, and a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “This is one more reason to be moderate with our caffeine intake.”
You can read the full story from the Post here.
The news isn’t all bad for coffee drinkers. As Ms. Judkis notes in her piece, research indicates that caffeine has health benefits. This was explored in detail in the Post, and also by the New York Times, under their "Upshot" vertical.
The author of the Times’s piece, Aaron E. Carroll, writes that “[c]offee has long had a reputation as being unhealthy. But in almost every single respect that reputation is backward. The potential health benefits are surprisingly large.”
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