Why do you drink bitter, dark roasted coffee or hoppy beer, while your colleague drinks sweet cola? A scientist looked for variations in our taste genes that could explain our drink preferences. Surprisingly, the study showed that taste preferences for bitter or sweet drinks are not based on variations in our taste genes, but rather on genes related to the psychoactive properties of these drinks.
"The genetics underlying our preferences have to do with the psychoactive components of these drinks," the researcher said. “People like the way coffee and alcohol make them feel, that's why they drink it, it's not the taste.”
The researcher found a variant in a gene, called FTO, linked to sugar-sweetened drinks. People who had a variant in the FTO gene — the same variant previously associated with a lower risk of obesity — surprisingly preferred sugar-sweetened drinks.
How the study worked
Beverages were divided into a bitter-tasting group and a sweet-tasting group. Bitter included coffee, tea, grapefruit juice, beer, red wine, and spirits. Sweet included sugar-sweetened drinks, artificially sweetened drinks, and non-grapefruit juices. This taste classification has been previously validated.
Drink intake was collected with 24-hour diet reminders or questionnaires. Scientists counted the number of servings of these bitter and sweet drinks consumed by approximately 336,000 individuals in the UK biobank. Then they did a genome-wide association study of the consumption of bitter drinks and the consumption of sweet drinks. Finally, they wanted to replicate their key findings in three US cohorts.
