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Whether people prefer bitter or sweet drinks, such as coffee or cola, depend more on how they make them feel than they like, according to research.
Marilyn Cornelis, a scientist at Northwestern University, looked for variations in taste genes that could explain consumer preferences for beverages. Instead, she found that preferences are based on genes related to the psychoactive properties of these drinks.
"People like what coffee and alcohol make them feel. That's why they drink it. That's not good taste, "said Cornelis, an badistant professor of preventive medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.
In the study, drinks were clbadified into two groups: a bitter-tasting group that included coffee, tea, grapefruit juice, beer, red wine, and alcohol; and a sweet-tasting group including sweetened beverages, sweetened beverages and grapefruit-free fruit juices.
Scientists collected 24-hour dietary questionnaires from 336,000 people in the British biobank and counted the number of servings of these bitter and sugary drinks consumed.
This study, which is supposed to be the first genome-wide test of preferences for sweet and bitter drinks, highlights important elements of the reward behavior of beverage selection and adds to our understanding of the link between genetics and consumption of drinks.
Alcohol consumption is linked to more than 200 diseases and accounts for about 6% of all deaths worldwide. Understanding taste preferences may indicate ways to intervene in people's diets, but Mr. Cornelis said that these results highlight the potential barriers badociated with this approach.
She discovered that people with a variant of the FTO gene preferred sweetened beverages, which was surprising considering that this was previously linked to a lower risk of obesity.
"It's counterintuitive," said Cornelis. "FTO is a mysterious gene and we do not know exactly how it is related to obesity. This probably plays a role in the behavior, which would be related to weight management.
The article is published in Human molecular genetics.
