#612: Does Sweet Taste Exposure Actually Develop Preference? – Prof. Katherine Appleton

0:00Danny Lennon: Hello and welcome to episode 612 of Sigma Nutrition Radio. My name is Danny Lennon. You are very welcome to the show. Today we're going to be taking a look at a really interesting and often misunderstood question. Does exposure to sweet taste actually make people prefer sweetness more and then go on and eat more sweet foods or struggle to move away from consuming them? because this is an issue that comes up a lot in nutrition discussions, particularly when we're talking about sugar or low calorie sweeteners and their effects on diet quality. But many of those claims set on a number of assumptions that may not be necessarily as solid as we sometimes think.

0:45Danny Lennon: And so, for example, we've all heard conversations around the use of low calorie sweeteners or beverages that use non-nutritive sweeteners. And the common claim is that, well, we shouldn't be using these because it accustoms people to consuming this sweet taste. They therefore build this preference and they won't be able to go and consume, let's say, normal drinks like water, or they won't be able to have meals that aren't really sweet because they've built this preference for sweetness and therefore their overall diet quality will suffer because they've been customizing themselves to having this sweetness around.

1:24Danny Lennon: That's a very common belief that may make some sense, but again, it's built on a number of different assumptions. There's some work that has looked to test these and see what do we actually know about preferences to sensory characteristics like sweetness? How does that connect with exposure to them? And then more so, how does that impact our overall intake? So to try and unpack the evidence in this area, I'm going to be talking to Professor Catherine Appleton from Bournemouth University in the UK. Professor Appleton is a psychology researcher whose work focuses in on healthy eating as a behavior, including food choice, taste preferences, and then those factors that influence what we consume.

2:09Danny Lennon: So in this particular episode, we're going to focus in on sweet taste exposure, concepts like sweet liking, the role of low and no calorie sweeteners and how that fits into this picture. And then overall, what does the current evidence tell us? What does it not support? Where are some of those gaps? And then from that position, what pragmatically can we conclude around this exposure to sweet tastes? I think you're going to find this really, really interesting. There's some excellent work done in this area. I will link to some of that in the episode page, which is linked in the description box where you are currently listening.

2:44Danny Lennon: So you can get more resources related to this topic there. Also, if you are a premium member, you will get a set of detailed study notes that covers everything that we discussed today with more detail, clarifications, explanations, diagrams, etc. That will be over on the episode page, which is again linked in the description box, or you can find it inside your members dashboard. For those of you listening on the free public feed of the podcast and are interested in getting more resources that help you really learn and retain more from the podcast listening that you're doing, then maybe consider becoming a Sigma Nutrition Premium member where you get these detailed study notes, fully edited transcripts, as well as a premium exclusive episode each month.

3:27Danny Lennon: All of the information about that membership, how it can potentially help for you, see if it might be a good fit for you all of that will be linked in the description box where you're listening right now or you can just go to sigmanutrition.com and find out more there and of course any of you that do consider becoming a member and joining us here you are very much welcome and a big thank you because it is the direct way that supports the podcast helps us keep this going and as we rely on our premium subscribers as opposed to external advertising etc you really do keep this podcast going so thank you so with all that said let's dive into this conversation between myself and professor katherine appleton

4:22Danny Lennon: here we are a big welcome to the podcast to professor katherine appleton thank you so much for taking the time out to come on the podcast. Thank you, Danny. It's nice to be here. As I've mentioned to you, I've really found your work fascinating and very informative. And I think it touches on a number of really interesting areas that maybe for some people might be counterintuitive based on some messages they might have heard. And I think there's a lot to take from it and how you've gone about that work. But before we get into the specifics of those, can you maybe give people an introduction to your academic background, your research interests, and the type of work and projects that you're involved in.

4:59Thank you, Dani. I'm a psychologist by background with research interests in healthy eating. So essentially, I'm interested in healthy eating as a behaviour rather than anything else kind of nutrition-wise. But all of my work then looks at public health concerns. So we've done a little bit of work on encouraging fruit and vegetable intakes, for example. well but then we've done a number of pieces of work now looking also at reducing free sugar consumption possible strategies or possible tools that might help with this and as part of this we've done quite a bit of work now on sweet taste and low calorie sweetness fantastic and of course

5:40Danny Lennon: we want to focus in on some of that today and for maybe some of your wider work i draw people's attention to go and look at your other publications in a whole range of really interesting areas but as you mentioned we want to focus in on this area around sweet taste and how that relates to some other aspects to preference intake and so on and i think one of the fascinating things from an overview level that some of your work has has alluded to is that it may be challenges that intuitive narrative i mentioned earlier that people have that exposure to sweet taste is going to train us in some way to have a stronger preference for that.

6:19Danny Lennon: And then this kind of logical sequence of saying, well, that will impact things like food reward. It will cause us to consume more foods and we'll want to seek out more sweet foods. Again, we can get into the details a bit later on. Can you maybe give your first initial thoughts to that kind of causal chain that sometimes people lay out that simply sweet exposure might be a problem because of how it might train us in some way, for lack of a better term. There is a lot of suggestion, both in the scientific literature, in policy and in public health discourse, or from the public as well, suggesting exactly as you say, that this exposure to sweet taste might increase our preferences for sweet taste, and consequently our consumption of sweet tasting foods.

7:07At present, however, we have very little evidence for this. A number of studies have now been conducted. I've been involved in some of them, but others have also conducted a number of studies. To look at exactly this question, does sweet taste exposure, so a change in sweet taste exposure, an increase or a decrease, impacts subsequent preferences or intakes of sweet-tasting foods? And currently, there is very little evidence to support this claim.

7:35Danny Lennon: There's a few things that maybe we should clarify for people here around some of this terminology, because it can be quite tricky to disentangle it if people are first coming across it. And even with the concept of sweetness, we of course have an idea in our mind of what that means. But even within the concept of sweetness, we can think about how we might actually define that. How do we even measure that different characteristics of sweetness? For example, some of your work looks at sweetness intensity, as well as if it's a liking for sweetness and so on. So can you maybe give people an idea of some of those different measures they might come across in the literature that relate to sweetness broadly, that might be distinct characteristics or distinct measurements that we might actually see in studies?

8:21I think at the start, there is sweetness perception, sweetness sensitivity. and essentially this is how much an individual might perceive or might experience a sweet taste when they consume a sweet product. It can be largely related to the amount of sugar or the amount of sweetener in the product but people do differ in their sensitivity to any taste stimulus. Secondly then there's a preference or liking for that specific sweet taste perception or yes sweet and sweet taste experience. And this is very different from how much somebody might experience a taste. It's definitely a hedonic response.

9:01How much do they like it? We might get into this a little bit later, but how much of it would they like to consume? There's also within the area the issue of sweet taste concentration. So here for a certain food, there tends to be a certain concentration of sweet taste within a certain stimulus. If you think of any commercial product a lemonade for example it will taste certain sweetness to some people people will like it to some degree but then you can also add in more sweetness so essentially the intensity increases or decreases and people again will increase or decrease their preference for a specific sweet taste concentration i think this is a really important concept because again

9:46Danny Lennon: at first glance people might think well yes some people like sweeteners other people not so much but here as you've alluded to we could have a situation where nominally we like sweetness in a broad sense but as we increase that intensity of the sweetness depending on individuals their liking for that increasing intensity can differ so some might have this linear response as it keeps increasing as they get more of that sweetness intensity for others it might go in the opposite direction or am I kind of even flatten out and so kind of this raises this idea that some of the work alludes to around whether this is some type of a established phenotype that we're seeing and we can we categorize these neatly into distinct phenotypes around sweetness liking or so on or as the case commonly is is a bit more complicated so what do you tend to to think of when we see these distinctions between that increasing sweetness intensity and how people might respond differently and how we should think of that in terms of this kind of sweet liker phenotype or distinct phenotypes we could come up with.

10:54There is the suggestion in the literature certainly that yes some people there as a sweet taste concentration increases their preference increases it's very much an upward trajectory those people are referred to as sweet likers or in some cases extreme sweet or sweet extreme likers. There are individuals as well that go the other way. So as the concentration of sweetness in a solution or a product increases, their liking for it decreases. So essentially it's a downward trajectory. These people are referred to as sweet dislikers. And then there's a group in the middle who potentially either their sweet liking for a solution will remain the same regardless of the concentration or their response looks more like an inverted U shape.

11:43So essentially it peaks at a certain concentration and then beyond that it will drop. There is a suggestion, these are referred to as sweet-like of phenotypes. So there is a suggestion that this is very much a stable characteristic of individuals, but there's increasing evidence to suggest that this may not be in actual fact the case, that it may be a bit more context-specific, but also that people may vary as a result of all types of characteristics.

12:13Danny Lennon: Before we get into some of the literature that alludes to this question around sweetness exposure and how that may or may not impact some of these other things in that chain we outlined earlier, in relation to actually measurement around sweetness and then how we should interpret some of the studies in this area, one of the notable things about a lot of the work you've done is that there's been a very, I would say maybe, ecologically valid use of real foods or trying to think about what people might be consuming in actual diets, as opposed to maybe some of the other more controlled work might specifically look at a sucrose solution in an isolated acute time point, let's say.

12:56Danny Lennon: Can you maybe just give people an idea of these different types of trial designs and what each of them might allow us to interpret or what types of research questions each of those might be answering? This question comes nicely from the Sweet Leica work, to be honest. A lot of the Sweet Leica work has looked at, exactly as you said, aqueous solutions that have sugar in them. These are nice controlled stimuli. They allow us to compare individuals. They allow us to compare environments, potentially. And they don't suffer from any previous history or any expectations on the part of consumers. Compared to them though we don't tend to consume sugar sweetened water in the real world.

13:42Many studies now are using more real foods commercially available foods or foods that are modelled on commercially available foods but maybe include different concentrations of a sweet stimulus sugar or a low calorie sweetener for example, so that you can look at sweet taste concentration as well as simply sweet taste liking.

14:03Danny Lennon: One of the things that relates earlier to this kind of thinking about liking and where we need kind of a clarification on terms maybe, is that in this whole area and certainly from some of the work that connects psychology to liking and wanting, desire to eat, all these things that might seem similar to people initially are distinct constructs that we might need to separate out that we can have a liking for a food that might differ from someone's motivation to eat at one particular time. And then when we think about preferences for food, that draws in a whole range of other factors that go beyond just simply do we like a certain taste or a characteristic or not.

14:41Danny Lennon: And so when we think about someone having a, let's say, preference for sweeter foods versus someone having at one particular time point a wanting or desire to consume something because of a certain taste or someone truly being a sweet liker how do we separate out these ideas that might seem similar at first but maybe are slightly different in how we should actually conceptualize them these are slightly different concepts and yeah they can be confusing others certainly different concepts in a scientific sense firstly denny we have uh liking and preference and liking it's very much essentially as simply as it says how you ask people how much do they like a product or how much do they like a taste and they rate it on a scale that runs from usually zero to a hundred or it could be just simply a different scale.

15:37Secondly we have preference and preference essentially by definition requires a choice so an individual has to prefer one thing over another one. So there you've essentially only got two samples and individuals are simply saying I like this one more than I like this one. Preference is commonly used in children because it's essentially an easier measure for them to undertake. Then though you have this issue of, as you suggested, some kind of motivation, desire or yes some kind of demand, something that can be refer to as wanting. This is conceptually different in the scientific literature from liking.

16:17Liking and wanting are commonly pitched against each other. Liking is really essentially a characteristic of a food and potentially the situation in which somebody is consuming it. Wanting by comparison has much more of a motivational context behind it or much more of a motivational suggestion. So it's along the lines of how much work will an individual do in order to get this food, what will they do to actually procure it?

16:43Danny Lennon: You mentioned around the concept of preferences and particularly within children. And one of the things you've highlighted to me previously is that for certain things, there may actually be this kind of establishment of preferences in relation to certain flavors, for example, and some of the work you've highlighted in relation to vegetable consumption. And noting that this is different from thinking about preferences in terms of sweetness. Can you maybe just separate those out and maybe explain to people where we do have the evidence around certain flavors or certain food groups in child development versus something specifically like sweetness per se?

17:23Yeah, a lot of the work that we've been doing recently has looked at sweet taste and essentially sweet taste in a number of different food products or a number of different, essentially a number of different eating scenarios compared to that there is work and we've been looking at sorry does sweetest exposure impact on liking or preferences for for subsequent sweet taste or sweet tasting food products compared to that there is some work in the vegetable world looking at essentially the same question does exposure to a vegetable flavor result in increased preferences or liking and increased acceptance or increased consumption of that vegetable flavor Here, while in sweet taste we find no evidence that there's any association between exposure and liking or preference, in the vegetable world there is the suggestion that exposure to a vegetable flavour or vegetable taste will result in subsequent increased acceptance, increased preference and increased consumption of that vegetable flavour.

18:24There's clearly here a difference between these two. We think at the moment that sweet taste is very generic. It's a taste that's much broader, whereas the work in vegetables is looking specifically at individual flavours. So the flavour of a vegetable, which may be transferred to other similar vegetable flavours, similar kind of bitter taste or flavour. But yeah, it's a slightly different scenario to the sweet taste scenario, which is we are considering more broader. Also, though, to mention, seeing as you've mentioned the vegetable work, some of these studies in vegetables do demonstrate this effect of exposure, but even there, it doesn't last for very long.

19:05It was kind of six months, a year later, these effects that researchers are finding have dissipated. Many of these studies are also done with children, and there may be differences here as well.

19:18Danny Lennon: I wanted to revisit that initial narrative I mentioned at the start of the discussion, where we have this idea or certain claims or beliefs that people may have around if there's an exposure to sweet tastes, we build this preference and that four is going to drive us to want to consume more of those sweet tastes over time. And that in turn might lead us to consume more foods with added sugars or more calories overall because we're consuming foods that tend to be people associate with sweetness. And sometimes it's one of the reasons people suggest, well, we shouldn't consume beverages that have artificially sweetened sweeteners, because in this case, we're going to be building this preference.

20:01Danny Lennon: People are going to want to consume these sweet drinks all the time, and maybe they'll consume sugar-sweetened beverages, or we'll just consume more added sugars in their diet, and this could be problematic. You alluded to the fact that much of this narrative, while sounds quite compelling, isn't built on very strong evidence. And I'm wondering, can we kind of distinguish between two parts of that. First, what areas we might have research questions that are maybe still open that we need some future research on, but what areas do we have some evidence that can give us some insight into where these claims might be falling down?

20:37Danny Lennon: That is to say, what evidence do you think is useful to highlight to people that relates to exposure to sweetness and this question around preferences and later intake either from your group from others what's some what's some of the evidence you would point people towards or is useful for them to be aware of i think the strongest evidence here will come from randomized control trials and here the design the study design is essentially that individuals are randomized to one or two several specific dietary interventions they're then encouraged to pursue that specific diet or the consumption of specific products or the lack of consumption of specific products.

21:21And effects on preferences or liking in this case are subsequently measured. So in a lot of these studies, or these randomized studies, individuals are randomized to consume either more sweet products, less sweet products, or to consume their usual diet and effects are looked at at a later date on preferences or liking. We've conducted, we've recently published one of these studies, a very big one. We've conducted a number of studies as well where only one product in the diet, for example, is manipulated. Other people have also conducted these types of studies. Some of them as well where individuals are asked to refrain from consuming food.

22:04So if they're swapped, for example, from a low-calorie sweetened beverage to a non-sweetened beverage, what are the effects of that change on subsequent preferences?

22:14Danny Lennon: So in this case, we have two parts of this question I think are really important for people to bear in mind. We have one that with increasing exposure does that lead to increases in preferences, and we can get some answers there. But we also importantly have the other part that you mentioned, that by reducing exposure to sweetness, which is, again, an intervention people commonly think might be useful, that if we get used to not consuming the sweetness, that will change our preferences and we won't want to consume or won't seek out sweet tasting foods, etc. That has also been looked at. And so we have good quality data based on randomized controlled trials for both of these sides of that coin, essentially.

22:54Yes, we do. We certainly have good quality data. Some studies have also included both arms, so they have an increase group and a decrease group. What's interesting though is although we have good quality data, we don't have very many studies that have looked at this yet. When we try and put all the data together, which we did in 2018, we published a review of all trials that we could find to look exactly at this research question. We're currently in the process of updating that to look at, again, when you look at all the studies together, what is the consensus? But here, even now, we don't have really enough studies to look at the difference between these two.

23:35Does it matter if you increase and that results in increased preferences? Or does it matter if you decrease your sweet food consumption and when that results in decreased preferences? At the moment, the evidence is simply telling us no change.

23:48Danny Lennon: And one of the interesting things here is that this is not just a narrative or a claim that we see floating around social media per se, but this is something that also gets discussed and gets pulled into discussions around public health policy, for example, despite the fact that, as you mentioned, that we don't have any data that suggests that it's actually being driven by this exposure to sweetness. And so from that perspective, do you find that is something that is essentially troubling that we can have a situation where policy is being debated on the basis of something we don't yet have evidence for?

24:22It certainly is troubling, Danielle. I would describe it as troubling. It's disappointing as well, to be honest, that policymakers are making policy without really considering the evidence. A lot of this, I think, has stemmed from, or in this particular case, has stemmed from, as you say, this kind of popular or almost logical argument that, well, if you increase your exposure to something, then it will become more familiar and might increase your

24:49Danny Lennon: preferences. There is some work in the salt world suggesting that increased salt consumption can increase preferences for salt. But again, increasing studies that try and directly compare sugar and salt find differences between these two. And we don't find this effect in sugar or for sweet taste, while it does seem to be more robust, more reliable in salt taste. And I guess a number of things that might be coming to mind for people who are nutrition professionals or dietitians is thinking at an individual of helping someone improve the quality of their diet and then knowing this person maybe reports that they have a certain liking for sweeteners.

25:31Danny Lennon: rather than working with that and giving them healthful options that could be indeed sweet food sweet meals drink lots of fruit etc there might be again if someone buys too much into this narrative and has this idea we need to reduce the sweetness of the diet or end up throwing out lots of things we already know about beneficial nutrients within diet good quality food sources healthful foods etc so from a practical standpoint we could even be running into problems again because we're not basing this on the data that you've discussed. Yeah again a real issue with these policies essentially. Exactly as you suggest if individuals are trying to cut down on their free sugar intake so they're reducing their consumption of sugary foods but assuming that they need to reduce their consumption of all sweetened foods first of all they will be missing out potentially on fruit and we know fruit is a very valuable and healthy food.

26:29They'll be potentially missing out on the sugars in dairy products as well and dairy products again for potentially very healthy foods but yes they could be essentially leading themselves down a route where their diet becomes just distasteful or unpatible to them which will then move them back to the sugar rather than being able to stick to a diet that they can that they find acceptable

26:53Danny Lennon: one of the things that seems is not only are some of these ideas maybe intuitive or people maybe want to kind of believe in that narrative because it sounds appealing. But also there's another part of it, I think that there's this misconception or people misattribute the idea of sweetness solely to added sugars, or sometimes people have misconceptions around the use of low calorie sweeteners. Maybe they have a bias towards them. And so anything that might be potentially saying they're not necessarily a problem in this specific context, there might be some resistance to that. And so I think there's maybe an ability for people to buy more into that narrative without looking at the evidence per se, because we put everything in the bucket of, oh, that relates to added sugars or these unnatural products per se, whereas really sweetness can, as you've mentioned, come from a variety of things beyond added sugar.

27:48This is a common problem in this area as well, I think, Danny. Yes, the health implications associated with free sugars are very much associated with free sugar consumption, not with all sugar consumption, and certainly not with all sweet toasting foods. So free sugars are the sugars added into foods typically. They're defined as sugars added into foods by the cook consumer or the manufacturer. The free sugars do not include fruit. So fruits are still recommended in dietary guidance as a healthy food source. Free sugars also don't include the sugars that naturally occur in milk or other dairy products.

28:30So again, healthy foods that still can taste sweet as a result of a natural sugar content.

28:35Danny Lennon: In terms of the evidence base, you mentioned that we do have some really good quality, really well-designed trials, but we might not have the quantity that we might necessarily want. And maybe there's some other interesting research questions to explore. So can you maybe give us an idea for, in terms of future research that either comes from your lab or from others, what types of research questions do we still need trials to help us answer? Or maybe what we do have, what might need to be replicated? What do you think are some of those avenues that hopefully we get more research on? This is an interesting question.

29:10When we put all the studies together, particularly in relation to sweet taste, we do find very consistently a lack of effect. Different studies have found this. Different studies using different sweet toast exposures, for example, different interventions. We find it whether people increase their sweet toast exposure or decrease their sweet toast exposure. We find it in a variety of populations, with a variety of different methods for assessing preference or liking or whatever it is. So, you know, there isn't very much literature there or there aren't very many trials. but at the same time they are showing a very consistent effect.

29:49So there is a question about is it worth, do we need another study to show us exactly the same thing? Where you might logically argue that we could do with more studies are maybe more in children, particularly you can, again from a logical point of view, children are developing their taste preferences. So maybe there's more room to change taste preferences in children. Again, yeah, most of the studies have been done on adults and maybe your taste preferences are more stable by the time you're an adult. But even in children, there are some studies there. The studies that are there are again demonstrating no effect.

30:27So again, there's a question of, yeah, how many times essentially do we have to study the same thing before people are convinced that actually there's nothing here to see and maybe we need to redirect our efforts somewhere else.

30:41Danny Lennon: I wonder how much of this is also a case where sometimes, specifically when we're looking at a specific characteristic like sweetness and then connecting it to, well, we're going to build a preference for it and we're going to want sweet foods, that we're maybe thinking a bit too in a reductionist manner, let's say, because that fits very neatly as opposed to, as much of your work alludes to, when we think about why people tend to habitually consume the types of foods they tend to consume. there's so many different factors that could explain that that don't fit neatly into this food has this particular characteristic there's so many things even beyond that food per se that might drive those reasons why someone habitually consumes a food and in this case let's say it just happens to be one that tends to be very sweet or high in added sugars or etc and we try and then connect that back to well this person always consumes sweet foods as opposed to thinking of all this myriad of factors that could be explaining that.

31:41Danny Lennon: Could you maybe speak to, and again, we're getting a bit away from what we initially started with, but for those things about what drives the habitual consumption that many people may have of different types of foods, just how broad that can be in terms of the explanatory factors, as opposed to our kind of reductionist view of trying to connect one sensory characteristic with it. There are a huge number of different factors that can impact whether somebody consumes a food or not. This is something that's very interesting. The work that we've spoken about so far is really focused on preference or liking preference, sweet toast perception and so on.

32:21But yes, of all the reasons that we consume a food, taste and sensitivities or sensory characteristics are high up there. they are one of the primary reasons that people consume the foods that they do. Pleasure and enjoyment is a huge factor as well, you can imagine. But there are a lot of other reasons for people consuming the foods that they do. Many of them related to their cognitions or their attitudes, how they perceive a food in terms of is it healthy? Will it potentially do me harm? There's obviously a lot of environmental factors as well that will determine what the foods that you consume essentially what foods do you have available to you and then yes not only what foods do you have available but what foods do you have as an alternative and this is an interesting question when we think about low calorie sweeteners as well to go back to sweet taste because of course whether people's whether people are willing to reduce their sugar consumption will depend on the alternatives they they see available to them and some of this will depend on not only their attitudes towards sugar or the foods sugary foods that they have available but their attitudes to the alternatives so low calorie sweeteners but again fruits dairy products natural sources of sweeteners that's a really useful concept because

33:41Danny Lennon: again if we reduce it to a binary of saying to someone you have to reduce your sugar sweetened beverage consumption and the only alternative allowable is plain water some people may indeed do that for health reasons. For some people, they might look at that alternative, as you suggest, and say, no thanks, and not too much of a change. But if there is this other option of changing that for artificially sweetened beverages, whether that be a temporary or even permanent change, then that might be something that allows them to reduce that sugar consumption. Indeed, we have data that would suggest that indeed does happen.

34:16Danny Lennon: And again, ties to what you said, rather than And if we have this very low resolution view of, well, we need to reduce the sweetness based on just our belief, then we're going to run into problems. Professor Appleton, before we finish up here, for what we've discussed today and or anything else that might come to mind on this topic around sweetness, what are the core things that you would most want people to take from this when we think about those big questions we've talked about in relation to the evidence base around sweet taste, sweet liking, preference and so on. What are some of those core ideas that are most important to take away from?

34:54Essentially that there is proposed this causal chain that sweet taste exposure results in changes in preferences or has impacts on sweet taste preferences, but there is no evidence. Currently, the consensus of the evidence is that there is no causal link here. this is if people take away one thing that is the one thing i would like them to take away we do not have the evidence for these suggestions increasingly we're finding more evidence essentially that the effect just simply isn't there and for everyone listening i'm going to

35:28Danny Lennon: link up to several of the publications from professor appleton around this topic you can find them in the description box we're listening right now i encourage you to go and read the full text of those and some other resources and publications that relate to this so with that we get to the final question that i always end the podcast on this can be to do with any topic even outside of what we've discussed today if you wish and it's simply if you could advise people to do one thing each day that might have a positive impact on any area of their life what might that one thing be? I think, Danny, I would go with do more exercise or do more physical activity, even though obviously I work in food and yeah, I spend my life looking at food.

36:14There's a huge benefit to increase physical activity. And yeah, I would certainly recommend more physical activity.

36:22Danny Lennon: Professor Catherine Abelden, thank you so much for taking time to talk to me for what you've shared with us today, but more so for your excellent work and your research in this area. So thank you for your contributions to the field. We're much appreciated. And thanks for sharing this with me. Thank you, Danny. And it's been a pleasure to be here. It's always nice to speak about our work.

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