ABSTRACT
Therapeutic interventions and physical obstructions created by the growth and spread of neoplastic tissue are sometimes responsible for reductions in food intake. Taste aversion learning has received a great deal of attention in recent years because it appears to be an unusually robust type of learning marked by extremely rapid acquisition and a high resistance to extinction. Familiar tastes are relatively resistant to the development of learned food aversions whereas novel tastes rapidly become the target of such aversions. The development of diet aversions in the novel but not the familiar diet group enabled us to assess the potential contribution of learned aversions to the anorexia produced by a chronic, aversive United States (US). The presence of learned aversions in animals with certain tumors indicates that physiological consequences of tumor growth can act as USs in aversion conditioning. The amino acids constitute one group of nutrients known to be influenced by tumor growth.
