EEG recordings during a Cola tasting suggest the taste-versus-health conflict plays out not on the tongue but at the moment people decide what a drink is worth.

Anyone who has stood in front of a vending machine knows the internal debate. The soda will taste good. It is also, as you are well aware, not good for you. A new study from Russia’s HSE University in Perm used brain recordings to pinpoint when that debate actually happens, and which side tends to win.

The answer, published in the British Food Journal, is that the conflict surfaces not while people are tasting, but when they decide how much they are willing to pay. And the sweet tooth usually prevails.

The taste-health dilemma

Food choices often involve a trade-off between pleasure and health. The trade-off is sharpest for hedonic foods, the treats people eat mainly because they enjoy them. Researchers from HSE University–Perm’s Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and its International Laboratory of Intangible-Driven Economy wanted to know how that conflict shapes willingness to pay, the maximum price a person is prepared to spend on a product. Economists use the measure because it captures how much someone values something in practical terms.

A tasting with brain recordings

The team recruited 40 participants aged 18 to 59. Each first completed a questionnaire measuring how strongly they craved sweets and how much attention they paid to healthy eating. They then tasted six Cola-flavored drinks. After each, they rated how much they liked the taste and named the most they would pay for a standard 330-milliliter can. The purchases were hypothetical; no money changed hands.

The tasting happened in two stages. In the first, it was blind: every drink was served in an identical clear glass. In the second, participants saw the packaging, the brand and information about sugar content. Throughout, electroencephalography, or EEG, recorded the electrical activity of their brains.

Cravings raise the price

People with stronger sweet cravings were willing to pay more even during the blind tasting, though their ratings of taste were about the same as everyone else’s. Once the packaging and sugar information were revealed, they not only kept paying more but also rated the drinks as tasting better.

The researchers attribute that shift to the power of familiar brands. Seeing a known label, they suggest, lets people more vividly imagine a product’s taste, which intensifies the craving and pushes up what they are willing to spend.

Health concerns show up in the brain

Interest in healthy eating played out differently. During the blind tasting, it was not visible in participants’ ratings or prices directly. It appeared instead in their brain activity. Participants who cared more about health showed higher activity in the beta frequency range over the prefrontal cortex, a region involved in deliberation and self-control, at the moment they were deciding how much to pay. That extra activity went along with a lower price.

In other words, for health-conscious people the decision was harder and more cognitively demanding, and they ended up willing to spend less. Strikingly, that link disappeared once packaging and composition information were shown, as though the familiar branding overrode the internal deliberation.

“The study shows that the internal conflict between taste and health benefits appears to arise not at the moment of tasting but later, when a person decides how much they are willing to pay for the drink,” said Daria Semyonova, a junior research fellow at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and the International Laboratory of Intangible-Driven Economy. “And in this conflict, the craving for sweets proves stronger than health concerns.”

Who pays more

The study also turned up demographic patterns. On average, younger participants and women were willing to pay more. In the open tasting, people with higher incomes were willing to spend more. Education, how often people usually drank Cola, and the presence of sugar in a given drink were not statistically significant factors.

That last finding is notable. Participants did not reliably pay less for a drink once they knew it contained sugar, despite the health information in front of them.

Context makes the stakes clear. A standard 330-milliliter can of regular Cola contains roughly 35 grams of sugar. The World Health Organization recommends that adults limit free sugars to less than 10 percent of their daily energy intake, about 50 grams on a typical diet, and suggests that staying below 5 percent brings further benefits. One can therefore accounts for most of a day’s recommended allowance.

Reading the results carefully

The study is small, with 40 participants, and the purchases were hypothetical, which can make people more generous than they would be with real money. It focused on a single product category in one country, and EEG offers only a coarse picture of where in the brain activity is happening. The links it finds between brain activity, attitudes and prices are correlations, not proof of cause.

Even so, the findings echo a broader theme in research on food choice and public health: knowing that something is unhealthy is not the same as acting on that knowledge, especially when a familiar brand is doing the persuading. Policies such as sugar taxes and front-of-pack warning labels are, in part, attempts to tip that internal contest. This study suggests the contest is decided at the point of purchase, which is exactly where those policies aim.

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Notes

1. “The taste–health dilemma in hedonic food consumption: behavioral attitudes, neural responses and willingness to pay for cola-flavored drinks.” British Food Journal, 17 July 2026. DOI: 10.1108/BFJ-11-2025-1589.
2. National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University–Perm). “Sugar cravings prove stronger than health concerns.” EurekAlert!, 23 July 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138741.