Tuning the value of sweet food: Blocking sweet taste receptors increases the devaluation effect in a go/no-go task.

Summary: Can a simple brain game help curb your sweet tooth? Researchers investigated a "Go/No-Go" training task where people must quickly stop themselves from pressing a button when they see specific foods. To understand the role of taste, half the participants rinsed with gymnemic acid—an herbal extract that temporarily blocks the ability to taste sweetness—while the others used a placebo.

The results were promising. The brain training successfully reduced how much people liked the "forbidden" sweet foods in both groups. However, the group that couldn't taste sweetness during the experiment showed an even stronger drop in their overall valuation of food. This suggests that combining impulse-control training with temporary taste modification could be a powerful way to retrain the brain and reduce cravings.