TASTE ACUITY CKANGES DURING PREGNANCY


Kathleen M. Wiese

School of Science and Natural Resources

Lake Superior State University

Sault Sainte Marie, MI 49783


November 19, 1996


Abstract.  It has long commonly recognized that certain food cravings
and aversions develop in many women during pregnancy, a phenomenon perhaps related
to changes in taste acuity.  This being so, the ability of pregnant women to
discriminate among differing concentrations of sodium chloride and of sucrose in
solution as well as their individual solution taste preferences were assessed to
determine if changes in taste acuity occur during pregnancy.  A sample of pregnant
(n=29) and non-pregnant (n=31) women participated in taste tests designed to assess
their respective taste acuities.  Participants sampled five solutions each of sodium
chloride and of sucrose, both in solution with distilled water, and then ranked each
solution set in order of perceived increasing concentration; participants also
indicated those solutions which they most preferred and which they least preferred
from each set.  The solution concentrations employed were used by Brown and Toma
(1986) in a similar study of pregnant and of non-pregnant women in which the
pregnant women tested were significantly less able to identify correctly
concentration differences in the sodium chloride solutions and preferred
significantly stronger sodium chloride solutions than their non-pregnant
counterparts.  In contrast, the results of this study, obtained via chi-squared
analysis of the ranking results and of taste preferences as well as Student's t test
analysis of mean preferred concentrations between populations, revealed that no
significant differences exist between the pregnant and the non-pregnant women tested
either respect to their ability to correctly rank the sampled solutions or with
respect to their simple taste preferences for sodium chloride and for sucrose.
These results suggest that taste acuity is not observably altered during pregnancy.



Selected References

Brown, J.E. and R.B. Toma.  1986.  Taste changes during pregnancy.  American Journal
of Clinical Nutrition 43:414-418.

Pike,	R.L. and D.S. Gursky.  1970.  Further evidence of deleterious effects produced
by restriction during pregnancy.  Am. Journal of Clinical Nutrition
23:883-889.