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Washington (AFP) – You love coffee and love dark roasts? Or maybe pale hops are more your thing?
The truth is perhaps that our preferences for caffeine or alcoholic beverages – or even sweet sodas – are not so much the way they taste, but how they make us feel, according to a new study published by leading scientists. Genetics of Northwestern University. in human molecular genetics on Thursday.
In her latest book, Marilyn Cornelis, who has already published books on the genetics of coffee consumption, is committed to determining which taste genes are responsible for what we drink, she said. l & # 39; AFP.
But to his surprise and to the surprise of the team, people's preferences are not based on variations of taste genes but rather on genes related to the effects of changing the spirit of beverages.
"The genetics that underlie our preferences is related to the psychoactive components of these beverages," Cornelis said.
"People like what coffee and alcohol make them feel, and that's why they drink it."
A study funded by the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health has collected 24-hour dietary questionnaires from some 336,000 people of European origin from the UK Biobank.
The drinks were divided into a bitter taste group and a sweet taste group.
Coffee and tea, grapefruit juice, red wine and spirits were among the bitter products; while sugary drinks included sweetened beverages, sweetened beverages and grapefruit-free juices.
The researchers then conducted a genome-wide association study of consumption patterns, which in turn were validated in three US populations.
"Taste can be a factor," Cornelis told AFP, but "it's an acquired taste".
Coffee, because of its bitterness, "is something we should avoid on an evolutionary level," she said. "But we consume it because we have learned to equate taste with the effect of caffeine."
One factor that researchers did not take into account, she said, is the sugar and cream that participants may have added to their coffee to hide their bitterness.
– Anomaly of the gene of obesity –
Cornelis also discovered that people with a particular variant in a gene called FTO preferred sweetened beverages. The result was surprising because the same variant had already been associated with a reduced risk of obesity.
Describing the discovery as "counter-intuitive," Cornelis said, "The OTF has been a mysterious gene, and we do not know exactly how it is related to obesity.
"It probably plays a role in the behavior, which would be related to weight management."
The overall results of the study could possibly help researchers find ways to intervene when consumption patterns become unhealthy.
Sugary drinks are related to obesity and various related ailments. Alcohol, meanwhile, is associated with more than 200 diseases and is responsible for about 6% of deaths worldwide.
"This tells you that if you are interested in intervening in some of these behaviors, the psycho-stimulant effects will probably be one thing, so it could be an obstacle for people who change their behavior," she said.
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