Investigation of the Relationship between Sweet Taste Sensitivity and Body Mass Index

  Introduction : Obesity is one of the most common causes of mortality in the world while the population of the obese people is increasing. Taste sense is a determinative factor in nutritional manner. From literature review it seems that body weight has positive correlation to personal sensitivity to sweet taste.   Aim: Regarding the high rate of obesity in our community, effect of carbohydrate on weight and lack of related data in our society, it was seemed necessary to investigate the correlation of Body mass index and sensitivity to sweet taste in Iranian community.   Materials & Methods: This is a case-control study. To investigate the sweet taste sensitivity of studied people to the sweet taste, the "whole Mouth Taste" method was used in their taste threshold and for weight evaluation BMI (Body Mass Index) was used. Sixty one studied people were simple randomly selected from patients attending in one obesity treatment clinic in Tehran and divided into three groups base on their sweet taste sensitivity and two groups (normal and obese) according to their weight. Comparison of weight index in people with different sweet taste sensitivity was evaluated using ANOVA test.   Results : There was a relationship between low sensitivity to sweet taste and high weight in women but this relationship was significant (p>0.05). There was not any relationship between sweet taste sensitivity and BMI in men.   Conclusion : However there was not a positive statistical correlation between over weighting and sweet taste sensitivity in the present study, science curative measures of obesity (as one of the main problems for the health of human beings) has low success rate, there still exists avenues to investigate this correlation and possibly use of taste senses as a curative factor in obesity.