On Friday afternoon, over 100 Binghamton University students and faculty members filled a lecture hall in Academic Building A to hear Robin Dando, an assistant professor in the department of food science at Cornell University, deliver a lecture on his research about the relationship between taste and obesity.

Dando gave a talk focused on the effect obesity has on taste, and the consequences that changes in taste can have on a person’s diet. He was brought to campus by Patricia Di Lorenzo, BU professor of psychology, as part of the 2016-17 Harpur College Dean’s Speaker Series for Integrative Neuroscience. The two met after Di Lorenzo gave a talk about her own work on the neural coding of sensory systems at Cornell.

The speaker explained that a diet exists as a type of feedback mechanism, with food consumption leading to a release in an organism’s pleasure receptors. When a food is consumed that a person enjoys, or gives them valuable nourishment, they receive a pleasurable response.

To measure the effect that obesity has on these tastes, Dando used specially bred mice with extremely similar genetic makeup. He then divided them into two groups and fed them different diets. One group received standard mouse food with a healthy balance of nutrients. The other group received a special diet that had extremely high levels of fat.

Starting in the 12th week of the mice’s lives, Dando measured their weight gain and each mouse’s number of taste buds. After eight weeks, the mice that were fed the high-fat food had experienced a dramatic weight gain and lost one-third of their taste buds. Without the taste buds to properly trigger the mice’s pleasure receptors, the obese mice ate more of their fat-heavy food, adding to their weight gain.

While Dando said it is not ethically possible to foster this kind of weight gain in human beings, he theorized that a similar response is present in obese people. Dando was able to test his theory on a small scale by studying the weight gain of freshmen at Cornell.

Researchers in Dando’s lab interviewed a group of students about their food consumption and took pictures of their tongues so they could study changes to their taste buds. Over the course of the semester, Dando and his team not only watched the students gain weight, but also watched them choose foods higher in calories when offered.

To make their study more encompassing, Dando’s lab also dulled the sense of taste in some students before offering them a snack. This was done to mimic the effect they theorized obesity has on taste.

“What we saw almost seems obvious, but when we blocked people’s sensitivity to taste they gravitated towards higher caloric levels in their food,” Dando said. “So that means that when real people lose their sense of taste they develop higher calorie diets.”

Di Lorenzo said she asked Dando to speak on campus so that students could gain a sense of the realities of research, rather than just reading about the work in textbooks.

“Because the textbook can be so dry and divorced from the actual people who are doing the science, this way they can see a real scientist and how the science is built,” Di Lorenzo said.

Monica DiDonato, a junior majoring in integrative neuroscience and one of Di Lorenzo’s students, said that she enjoyed that Dando’s talk helped explain people’s dietary choices.

“Everyone eats three meals a day, and it’s interesting to see there’s a reason why people eat more and taste certain things,” DiDonato said. “It’s interesting to see what leads to what.”