Turns out ditching sweet-tasting foods might not do what you think. A new six-month trial found that eating more or less sweetness didn't shift how much people craved it — or move the needle on weight, blood sugar, or heart health markers at all.
The Experiment
Researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Bournemouth University in the UK split 180 participants into three groups and followed them for six months. One group ate a diet heavy on sweet-tasting foods, another ate minimal sweetness, and a third stuck to an average level. The sweetness in these diets came from a mix of sources — added sugar, naturally occurring sugars like those in fruit, and low-calorie sweeteners. The findings were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
That distinction matters. A food can taste sweet for very different reasons — fruit brings natural sugar packaged with fiber and vitamins, while some processed snacks deliver sweetness with none of that nutritional upside.
What They Found: Basically Nothing Changed
At checkpoints throughout the trial — one month, three months, six months — researchers tracked whether participants' taste for sweetness had shifted, along with body weight and blood and urine markers tied to diabetes and heart disease risk.
The result: no meaningful differences among the three groups on any measure. People eating more sweet food didn't develop a stronger sweet tooth. People eating less didn't lose their taste for it. Body weight and health markers stayed essentially flat across all three diets.
Even more telling — once the trial ended, most participants drifted right back to their old eating patterns on their own.
Why This Challenges Current Health Advice
The finding pokes a hole in guidance from major health bodies, including the World Health Organization, which have encouraged cutting sweetness broadly as a tool against obesity. According to the research team, that advice overlooks a key detail: it doesn't distinguish between sweetness that comes from sugar, low-calorie sweeteners, or naturally sweet foods, even though those sources behave very differently in the body.
The Real Target, According to Researchers: Sugar, Not Sweetness
The team argues that sweetness and sugar have gotten conflated in public health messaging, when they're not the same thing at all. Some genuinely sweet foods, like fresh fruit and dairy, come with real nutritional benefits. Meanwhile, plenty of fast food doesn't register as "sweet" on your tongue but still packs a heavy sugar load.
The researchers' central argument is that reducing sweet-tasting foods isn't the right lever to lower obesity rates. Instead, they point to sugar intake itself as the more meaningful health concern — noting that some savory fast-food items can be surprisingly high in sugar despite not tasting sweet, while naturally sweet foods like fruit and dairy often carry genuine health benefits. Their conclusion is that public health guidance should shift toward reducing sugar and energy-dense foods specifically, rather than targeting sweetness as a category.
Energy-dense foods — ones that pack a lot of calories into a small portion — are often the real culprits, and they tend to overlap heavily with highly processed foods loaded with added sugar, fat, or both.
The Takeaway
Simply training yourself away from sweet flavors doesn't appear to move your cravings, your weight, or your metabolic health in six months, based on this trial. The researchers suggest dietary advice would do more good focusing on actual sugar content and calorie density, not whether something tastes sweet on the tongue.
The information in this article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized medical or dietary advice. Talk with a registered dietitian or physician about how sugar and sweetness fit into your individual health needs.
