Avoiding very sweet foods eventually makes them taste too sweet and reduces sugar cravings Dr Scott Kanowski on the Huberman Lab podcast out now.

OR stop eating processed sugar, have your first twix/hershey/ kitkat bar in a long time and realize it's so underwhelming it's simply not worth it Halloween PSA: conventional chocolate quality ain't what it used to be

Well, yeah. You even start smelling sugar. In my experience only took about 90 days of zero sugar(s) intake. Still can’t take sweet things ten years on.

there is a human study on this too. people on a low sugar diet for about 3 months started rating the same desserts as noticeably sweeter, even though they did not like them any less. the palate recalibrates pretty fast

Agreed - I have found this has happened to me over the past 10 years as I have slowly eliminated sugary foods from my diet.

This matches what I see. Once clients cut dessert for 2 to 3 weeks, a cookie that used to feel normal tastes sickly sweet. Cravings drop because the bar moved, not because of willpower.

Same thing happens with salt. Taste adjusts to what you feed it. The start is the hard part. After that you stop wanting it.

Same principle works for movement. The nervous system recalibrates to what you feed it daily. Sit all day and gentle movement starts to feel like effort. Move a little every day and that becomes the new normal. It's incredible how fast we can adapt when we consciously arrange it.

It's real, from someone who runs the business, and there's no claim anyone can pick apart.

You need to avoid or eliminate fake sweets, too.

This is true and this is why I can no longer eat anything with frosting

Taste really is trainable, and Huberman covered the wiring behind it with Dr. Charles Zuker too, who studies how the brain builds sugar craving in the first place. Kanowski's point about plasticity lines up with that. What you eat shapes what you want.

Noticed this in my own kitchen: after a few weeks of halving the sugar in tea and soups, a ripe pear or roasted sweet potato started tasting like dessert. Does the palate reset happen faster if you cut gradually or all at once?

Habituation is a powerful feature that can be used in interesting ways

Wow, groundbreaking stuff

You don’t need a PHD to figure that out. Common sense.

Same with salty foods…

Yeah your taste and preferences can be reprogrammed. It happened to me with fast food and sweets. After being on a healthy diet, then trying to junk out on the foods I used to binge on it doesn't taste as good. It like tastes weird and I don't want a lot of it.

living in Asia helps

This matches controlled taste-adaptation work: Wise et al. (Am J Clin Nutr 2016) found three months on a reduced-sugar diet shifted preferred sweetness intensity downward—without making food less pleasant overall. The palate recalibrates; cravings aren't fixed set points.

It's amazing how much our tastes and habits can change over time. Helping our kids develop healthier relationships with food early on can make a real difference for the whole family. 🙏

Truth. I started avoiding sugary foods in my early 20s and within about 2 years freshbaked whitebread smelled like donuts to me.

Cutting sweetness can make some foods taste sweeter, but the evidence that it permanently kills sugar cravings is mixed

That's been my experience, but after foregoing sweets for so long, last night I sat down with a bag of dried apples and MY GOD were they delicious. I gorged myself and got sick, but my taste buds were totally reactivated to crave that sweetness....

@hubermanlab I noticed this with myself, I used to eat a lot of sweets and it's very common here in my state, people here consume a lot of sweets, but recently I've been consuming a lot less sugar & sweets and suddenly the sweets which used to taste good now seems too much sweet.

This was like stopping sugar for a while, then eating it again tasted and made me feel gross 😅

The palate recalibration is real. Give it a few weeks of fewer hyper-sweet foods and whole foods genuinely start tasting better on their own. One of the few nutrition changes that gets easier instead of harder over time.

Makes sense why I hate drinking soda

Same law applies to ambition. What you feed daily sets what you crave. Napoleon Hill said burning desire is built by repetition, so feed the target and starve the noise. Cravings follow whatever you rehearse.

In a Monell study, people who cut simple sugars by about 40% for a few months rated the same puddings roughly 40% sweeter than controls. Preferred sweetness didn't shift much, so intensity and liking aren't the same thing.

Yep it almost makes me nauseous now

same with salt