Psychology refers to this as arousal, or how excited the brain gets by incoming information. And when it comes to food? There’s nothing quite like sugar to arouse the brain. If you hand a child an eight-ounce glass of water, a sugar bowl, and a spoon, and tell them to make the water perfectly sweet for themselves, they will add an average of eleven heaping teaspoons of sugar into the glass. That syrupy concoction is sweeter than soda—nearly twice the sweetness that adults prefer—and their liking of it is deeply rooted in our biology.
