How Your Genes Influence Your Taste
And how scientists may become able to alter our perception of taste in the future
Hiya!
My brother is the pickiest eater I’ve ever known. Most of my family thought his palette would expand as he got older, but his preferences as an adult haven’t changed much. I can describe his diet in two words: bland and repetitive. I don’t judge him for it; people like what they like, but I do find it curious because I enjoy many food types and flavors. So it makes me wonder, how much of our food preferences are genetic?
Luckily, experts are already finding out. In fact, recent studies focusing on the relationship between genes and diet discovered nearly 500 genes that seem to influence which foods we eat. As research continues, scientists could use a person’s genetics to design individualized nutrition plans to help prevent diseases and improve health outcomes.
Why We Like the Foods We Like
On the surface, our food preferences aren’t a big deal — we either like something, or we don’t, or maybe we like something but only under certain conditions. But really, whether you do or don’t enjoy the flavors of food is influenced by more than your tastebuds. Okay, so flavor is the top driver determining food choice, but it’s not the only factor.
Joanne Cole, a geneticist and an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and lead researcher in the studies I’ll tell you about next, explains:
“The foods we choose to eat are largely influenced by environmental factors such as our culture, socioeconomic status, and food accessibility.”
The wide range of influences also makes it more challenging to pinpoint why we prefer some foods over others or fall into specific eating patterns. Let alone figure out what role, if any, our genes play in our preferences or dietary requirements.
Another hindrance is that we haven’t been technologically advanced enough to detect genetic influences amid the other factors. The good news is the technology now exists to attempt such a feat, and Cole wasted no time trying it out.
New Research
Cole and her colleagues used data from the U.K. Biobank, a vast public biomedical database and research resource containing the genetic and health information of 500,000 participants living in the United Kingdom.
Using this data, the researchers performed a Phenome-wide Association Study (PheWAS), which is used to identify links between different gene variants and various human behaviors and traits — including diet.
2020 Research
Back in 2020, Cole and her colleagues conducted a heritability analysis using the Biobank data, which involved scanning the human genome to locate areas connected with diet patterns and food types. Then, they narrowed the regions down.
In the end, they found 814 regions of the genome associated with dietary intake but a median of only about 5 percent of the genetic components that influence nutritional traits. Still, Cole was optimistic about the results, as she stated in an interview with Scientific American:
“So it meant that they are super environmental traits — but it doesn’t mean that that 5 percent is nothing.”
Cole published the study in Nature Communications, but a short three years later, she’s back with more results.
2023
This time, Cole and her team took advantage of the rich information the U.K. Biobank provides, which includes detailed health and genetic information and socioeconomic data.
This additional information allowed the researchers to analyze individual gene variants and see if they’re associated with thousands of other traits. Then, they could eliminate indirect ones that are more strongly linked with other factors, like diabetes, for instance.
Cole and her team identified 481 genome regions with direct links to particular food preferences and dietary patterns. More specifically, 287 areas were associated with specific food types, like alcohol, cheese, fish, fruit, and tea, while 194 were linked to dietary patterns indicating whether someone generally ate more healthy or non-healthy food items.
Cole told Scientific American that the genes related to digestive enzymes, taste receptors, and olfactory receptors had the strongest effect on diet. She explains:
“In most of our diets, we eat various foods together, so the foods we eat are often connected to each other. But the olfactory receptor genes we identified were so specific. One was associated with cheese and nothing else. There’s one very specific to fruit. There’s one very specific to vegetables. There’s one very specific to coffee.”
Cole and her team’s findings haven’t been peer-reviewed yet, but they were presented in July 2023 at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual flagship conference.
Future Research
As exciting as all this is, more research is needed, and Cole is not short on ideas about what to tackle next. According to her, this and similar studies are just “scratching the surface” of what’s possible. Now that scientists have located these particular regions of the genomes, Cole wants to learn more about them and figure out which genes directly influence a person’s diet. Cole explains in the interview:
“My goal is to find the genes that are really closely linked to dietary intake and not other conditions because I want to see if we can act on those genes’ biological pathways. For instance, we could alter the flavor compound that binds to [specific receptors] to elicit a different brain response. Perhaps that could improve people’s nutritional adherence to healthier foods for disease management.”
In other words, since flavor is still the primary driver of our food preferences, Cole wants to know whether scientists could modify the perception of flavor — rather than alter the actual flavor — to encourage people to eat healthier foods.
For instance, if you dislike broccoli, rather than alter broccoli’s flavor like growing candy-flavored broccoli. Scientists might someday be able to change people’s genes in a way that they enjoy the taste of broccoli. Cole puts it simply: “Can we modify the perception of flavor by understanding the biology?”
Perspective Shift
Our relationship with food as humans is a complicated one. Can you imagine explaining a doughnut to a hunter-gatherer? No, but really, we consume all sorts of foods we know, on a logical level, aren’t good for us, and yet, they taste so good — I say as I pop another Oreo into my mouth. Half the time or more, we don’t even know what’s in the food we eat.
But imagine what life might be like if someone who engages in unhealthy eating habits could go to the doctor’s office and alter their genes so healthy food becomes more appealing. Then again, this knowledge could just as easily become a nightmare situation. At what point do we draw the line when it comes to gene alterations?
Granted, we’re likely a long way off from any of this. Although, at the rate our technology advances, maybe we’ll chat about this again within the next decade. I mean, if there’s one thing the 2020s has shown me, it’s that anything is possible. Sigh. Anyway, the fact this research exists at all is mind-boggling. I wonder what else our genes might influence that we’re wholly unaware of.
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