Our genetics suggest beverage preferences hinge on psychoactive effects.
- First genome-wide test for bitter or sweet beverage preferences
- ‘People like the way coffee and alcohol make them feel’
- Beverage choices are more about mental reward than taste
Why do you swig bitter, dark roast coffee or hoppy beer while your coworker
guzzles sweet cola?
Scientist Marilyn Cornelis searched for variations in our taste genes that
could explain our beverage preferences, because understanding those preferences
could indicate ways to intervene in people’s diets.
To Cornelis’ surprise, her new Northwestern Medicine study showed taste
preferences for bitter or sweet beverages aren’t based on variations in our
taste genes, but rather genes related to the psychoactive properties of these
beverages.
“The genetics underlying our preferences are related to the psychoactive
components of these drinks,” said Cornelis, assistant professor of preventive
medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “People like
the way coffee and alcohol make them feel. That’s why they drink it. It’s not
the taste.”
The study highlights important behavior-reward components to beverage
choice and adds to our understanding of the link between genetics and beverage
consumption — and the potential barriers to intervening in people’s diets,
Cornelis said.
Sugary beverages are linked to many disease and health conditions. Alcohol
intake is related to more than 200 diseases and accounts for about 6 percent of
deaths globally.
Cornelis did find one variant in a gene, called FTO, linked to
sugar-sweetened drinks. People who had a variant in the FTO gene — the same
variant previously related to lower risk of obesity — surprisingly preferred
sugar-sweetened beverages.
“It’s counterintuitive,” Cornelis said. “FTO has been something of a
mystery gene, and we don’t know exactly how it’s linked to obesity. It likely
plays a role in behavior, which would be linked to weight management.”
“To our knowledge, this is the first genome-wide association study of
beverage consumption based on taste perspective,” said Victor Zhong, the
study’s first author and postdoctoral fellow in preventive medicine at
Northwestern. “It’s also the most comprehensive genome-wide association study
of beverage consumption to date.”
How the study worked
Beverages were categorized into a bitter-tasting group and a sweet-tasting
group. Bitter included coffee, tea, grapefruit juice, beer, red wine and
liquor. Sweet included sugar-sweetened beverages, artificially sweetened
beverages and non-grapefruit juices. This taste classification has been
previously validated.
Beverage intake was collected using 24-hour dietary recalls or
questionnaires. Scientists counted the number of servings of these bitter and
sweet beverages consumed by about 336,000 individuals in the UK Biobank. Then
they did a genome-wide association study of bitter beverage consumption and of
sweet beverage consumption. Lastly, they looked to replicate their key findings
in three U.S. cohorts.
Alan Kuang is also a Northwestern author on the paper.
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