How Flavor Learning Changes Preference

Why do we crave some foods the more often we eat them? Are we addicted?

Dr. Dana Small’s research suggests that food craving reaches far beyond taste or willpower, and that “addiction” isn’t a helpful descriptor. Every time we eat, unconscious signals from the body teach the brain which foods deliver useful nutrients, and train us to want more of those. In other words, we don’t eat crave foods because they taste good; foods taste good because our body craves them.

Understanding that means we can rethink overeating. It’s not a matter of addiction or self-control; it’s our body behaving the way nature intended it to, but in the setting of foods not found in the wild, like those high in both fat and carbohydrates. But we may also be able to train our brain away from these cravings.

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What We Cover

• Taste vs. flavor, pleasure, motivation, and food reward
• How gut nutrient signals teach the brain which foods to seek
• Why fat + carbs produce an unusually strong reward response
• What eight weeks of high-fat, high-sugar snacks did to the brain
• How GLP-1s may cut food wanting while preserving pleasure

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Dana Small is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Metabolism and the Brain and a professor at McGill University, with appointments in Neurology and Neurosurgery and Medicine. She directs the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center, and her research examines how sensory, metabolic, and neural signals interact to shape food reward, eating behavior, and metabolic health.

📍What Dr. Dana Small & Mike Haney discussed:

• 02:44 - Is food actually addictive?
• 05:02 - Taste and flavor are different senses
• 08:21 - Why “hedonic” vs. “homeostatic” eating is misleading
• 10:42 - The reward from sugar begins after you swallow it
• 22:32 - The “high road” and “low road” of food reward
• 27:41 - How scientists teach the brain to associate a flavor with calories
• 38:30 - Why combining fat and carbohydrates produces more reward
• 47:34 - How beliefs about food can change physiological responses
• 50:02 - Eight weeks of snacks changes how the brain responds to food
• 57:51 - What this science means for people trying to eat differently
• 1:03:50 - How GLP-1 drugs may change food wanting
• 1:07:30 - Can GLP-1s help retrain eating behavior for the long term?

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Habitual Daily Intake of a Sweet and Fatty Snack Modulates Reward Processing in Humans (Cell Metabolism, 2023)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36958330/
• Supra-Additive Effects of Combining Fat and Carbohydrate on Food Reward (Cell Metabolism, 2018)https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(18)30325-5
• Integration of Sweet Taste and Metabolism Determines Carbohydrate Reward (Current Biology, 2017)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28803868/
• Rethinking Food Reward (Annual Review of Psychology, 2020)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31561741/
• In Defense of Pleasure: We Need to Rethink Food Reward and Obesity (PLOS Biology, 2025)https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003497
• Mind Over Milkshakes: Mindsets, Not Just Nutrients, Determine Ghrelin Response (Health Psychology, 2011)https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21574706/

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/lXlCqNqjgHY

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.