I bet you've heard that if you can just cut out sugar for 30 days, your sweet tooth will disappear.

You won't even want dessert anymore.

And it's such an appealing idea.

But a new study suggests that our taste for sweetness may not be so easily changed.

And that raises some interesting questions about what actually does change

when people improve their eating habits.

Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, and you are listening to the Nutrition Diva podcast,

a show where we take a closer look at the latest

nutrition news, trends, and research, and answer your food and nutrition questions.

And today, I want to zero in on a study that was recently published in the American Journal

of Clinical Nutrition and what it seems to say about that so-called sweet tooth of yours.

The researchers wanted to test the hypothesis

that cutting down on sweet-tasting foods

would eventually reduce our desire for them.

After all, this is the underlying rationale

for all those 30-day sugar detox programs out there.

So they recruited about 180 adults in Holland, the Netherlands,

and the group was about 75% female with an average age of 35.

Three-quarters of them were considered normal weight, and a quarter of them were classified

as overweight. Before beginning this intervention, researchers used dietary records to estimate the

overall sweetness of each participant's baseline diet, and they included both sugar and low or zero-calorie sweeteners.

The next step was to measure how much people actually liked sweetness.

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