Frontostriatal and behavioral adaptations to daily sugar-sweetened beverage intake: a randomized controlled trial

Current obesity theories suggest that the repeated intake of highly palatable high-sugar foods causes adaptions in the striatum, parietal lobe, and prefrontal and visual cortices in the brain that may serve to perpetuate consumption in a feed-forward manner. However, the data for humans are cross-sectional and observational, leaving little ability to determine the temporal precedence of repeated consumption on brain response. We tested the impact of regular sugar-sweetened beverage intake on brain and behavioral responses to beverage stimuli. We performed an experiment with 20 healthy-weight individuals who were randomly assigned to consume 1 of 2 sugar-sweetened beverages daily for 21 d, underwent 2 functional MRI sessions, and completed behavioral and explicit hedonic assessments. Consistent with preclinical experiments, daily beverage consumption resulted in decreases in dorsal striatal response during receipt of the consumed beverage ( = -0.46) and decreased ventromedial prefrontal response during logo-elicited anticipation ( = -0.44). This decrease in the prefrontal response correlated with increases in behavioral disinhibition toward the logo of the consumed beverage ( = 0.54; = 0.02). Daily beverage consumption also increased precuneus response to both juice logos compared with a tasteless control ( = 0.45), suggesting a more generalized effect toward beverage cues. Last, the repeated consumption of 1 beverage resulted in an explicit hedonic devaluation of a similar nonconsumed beverage ( < 0.001). Analogous to previous reports, these initial results provide convergent data for a role of regular sugar-sweetened beverage intake in altering neurobehavioral responses to the regularly consumed beverage that may also extend to other beverage stimuli. Future research is required to provide evidence of replication in a larger sample and to establish whether the neurobehavioral adaptations observed herein are specific to high-sugar and/or nonnutritive-sweetened beverages or more generally related to the repeated consumption of any type of food. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02624206.