The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
For instance, a lot of what's happened with highly processed foods is that manufacturers have figured out how to trigger more dopamine response by ingestion of these sugary foods and created textures, and created essentially design of foods for two purposes.
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And the people who make foods, processed foods in particular, are phenomenally good at figuring out what drives the dopamine system and makes you want more of these things either because of the way they taste and/or because of the way they trigger neurons in your gut that have nothing to do with taste that simply make you desire more of the food.
These are sugars that are placed into processed foods that are designed to trigger activation of these mechanisms to lead you to want to eat more of these foods, but not because they necessarily taste sweet or delicious, but because they are activating these subconscious mechanisms that are driving you to pursue more of these foods.
One of the things that's commonplace nowadays is in many processed foods there is a business, literally, a business of putting so-called hidden sugars, and these hidden sugars are not always in the form of caloric sugars. They're sometimes in the form of artificial sweeteners into various foods, and you might say, "Well, "why would they put more sugar into a food "and then disguise the sugary taste "given that sweet tastes often compel people "to eat more of these things?" Well, it's a way, actually, of bypassing some of the homeostatic mechanisms for sweet, even though we might think that the more sweet stuff we eat, the more sweet stuff we crave, in general, people have a threshold whereby they say, "Okay, I've had enough sugary stuff."
Those foods, even if they contain artificial sweeteners, that will then signal to the brain to release more dopamine and make you crave more of that food. Whereas had you been able to perceive the true sweetness of that food, you might have consumed less.