The discrepancies among research studies on adults could be due to several factors, including not controlling for potentially confounding factors such as prior drinking history or comorbid conditions that are more prevalent in adults with a family history of alcoholism [27]. For example, both tobacco usage and affective illnesses, such as depression, exhibit similar inverse relationships with sweet food liking [28,29], leading some to speculate that nicotine-addicted and depressed individuals seek out sweets to alleviate feelings of withdrawal and dysphoria, respectively. Also, the wide age range of subjects in some of the studies is problematic because sweet preference decreases with age [6,30,31].
