With the holidays quickly approaching, many will be faced with the decision of how much they want to gorge on holiday feasts.

However, despite a common misconception that good-tasting food is automatically unhealthy, researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center have debunked the claim and have suggested that desirable taste in and of itself does not lead to weight gain.

“Most people think that good-tasting food causes obesity but that is not the case. Good taste determines what we choose to eat, but not how much we eat over the long-term,” study senior author Michael Tordoff, Ph.D., a physiological psychologist at Monell, said in a statement.

Previous research on obesity has generally relied on feeding rodents good tasting food such as chocolate chip cookies, potato chips and sweetened condensed milk, which has led to the rodent overeating and becoming obese.

However, the studies did not previously focus on separating the positive sensory qualities of the appetizing foods from their high sugar and fat content as it was impossible to know if the taste was actually driving the overeating.

The researchers were able to establish that laboratory mice strongly like food with added nonnutritive sweet or oily tastes by giving the mice two cups of food.

One of the group of mice had a choice between a cup of plain rodent chow and a cup of chow mixed with the noncaloric sweetener sucralose and the other group received a choice between the plain rodent chow and a cup of chow mixed with mineral oil, which also has no calories.

Additional tests showed that even after six weeks, the animals still highly preferred the taste-enhanced diets, demonstrating the persistent strong appeal of both sweet and oily tastes.

The researchers fed mice a high-fat diet that is known to make mice obese in another experiment.

The mice that were fed the high-fat diet sweetened with sucralose got not fatter than those who were fed the plain version.

“Even though we gave mice delicious diets over a prolonged period, they did not gain excess weight,” Tordoff said. “People say that ‘if a food is good-tasting it must be bad for you,’ but our findings suggest this is not the case.

“It should be possible to create foods that are both healthy and good-tasting.”

Also contributing to the research, which was supported by Monell Center institutional funds, were Monell scientists Jordan Pearson, Hillary Ellis and Rachel Poole.

The study was published in Physiology & Behavior.