©  The Author(s)  2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Sweet taste perception not altered after acute sleep deprivation in healthy young men Short sleep duration is considered a risk factor for weight gain in both children and adults [1]. A breadth of recent evidence suggests that this relation is causal. For in-stance, experimental sleep loss in healthy young men has been linked to reduced physical activity [2], increased appetite for sweet foods [3, 4], increased circulating ghrelin levels [4, 5], and increased neu-ral responses to images of palatable foods [6]. This latter observation warrants fur-ther attention: when viewing food images, sleep-deprived men show enhanced neu-ral activation in brain regions involved in both gustatory and reward processing, in-cluding the nucleus accumbens, thala-mus, insula, and anterior cingulate cor-tex. This, in conjunction with previous observations that sleep-deprived men show an increased appetite for sweet foods [3], led us hypothesize that one night of total sleep deprivation (TSD) would en-hance perception of sweet taste in healthy young men. To this aim, sweet taste per-ception was tested in 16 male subjects after either a night of normal sleep or TSD. Pre-vious studies have shown that TSD affects both plasma ghrelin and glucose concen-trations [4, 7]. Ghrelin is mainly produced by the stomach and stimulates food intake [8]. In addition, ghrelin has previously been linked to taste perception [9, 10] and food reward evaluation [11, 12] in animal studies. Thus, plasma levels of total ghre-lin and glucose, as well as subjective hun-ger feelings were measured after sleep and TSD respectively