Do you like coffee? You can be genetically wired this way

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2018 (HealthDay News) – The bitter taste of coffee should not be a selling point. But a genetic variant explains why so many people love beer, suggests a new study.

Bitterness has evolved as a natural warning system to protect people from harmful substances. That means they should want to spit coffee, the researchers said.

But their study of more than 400,000 people in the UK found that the more sensitive people are sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more they drink coffee. Sensitivity is caused by a genetic variant.

"You expect that people particularly sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine will drink less coffee," said author of the study, Marilyn Cornelis, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University's Chicago.

But people more sensitive to the bitterness of coffee and caffeine have learned to associate "good things", which would be the stimulation provided by caffeine, said Cornelis in a press release issued by a university.

"The taste has been studied for a long time, but we do not know all the details," she added. "We want to understand it from a biological point of view."

The study appears on November 15 in the newspaper Scientific reports.

More information

The US National Institute on Drug Abuse has more about caffeine.