Salivary response to olfactory food stimuli in anorexics and bulimics.

Salivary response to olfactory food stimuli was assessed in controls and in anorexia nervosa and bulimia in-patients before and after two months of treatment. Before treatment, anorexics salivated less then controls while bulimics salivated more than controls. Following treatment, the salivary responses of eating-disordered subjects were much closer to controls. Salivary response to food was correlated with a measure of variability in caloric consumption. There may be two styles of dietary restraint: strict, unrelenting dieting, or the "dieting drone", exemplified by anorexic patients, and variable, "fence-sitting" dietary restraint, exemplified by bulimic patients. It is suggested that this two-style theory is able to account for past contradictory findings of heightened or suppressed saliva flow rates in dieters.