Our Genes May Affect Taste Perception, Food Choices, and Health

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Our Genes May Affect Taste Perception, Food Choices, and Health

Taste-related genes could play a role in what foods people eat and influence certain health outcomes, according to a new study presented at Nutrition 2022 Live Online, the annual conference of the American Society for Nutrition, and described in a press release from the organization.

The preliminary findings presented at the conference are based on studying over 6,000 adults, and represent one of the first times researchers have examined how genes are related to perception of all five tastes — sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory) — as well as food consumption and cardiometabolic risk factors, like blood pressure and waist size.

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According to the researchers, these findings suggest that taking a person’s taste perception into account — based on genetic tests — could potentially play a role in giving personalized nutrition guidance, allowing for recommendations that are compatible with a person’s taste preferences when a healthier diet could improve a person’s health. These findings could be particularly helpful to people with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease and people giving them dietary advice, the researchers said.

The researchers used data from previous studies to identify genetic variants that are linked to perception of each of the five basic tastes. They then used this information to create a “polygenic taste score” that provides an estimate of the effect of a person’s genes on perception of each specific taste. A higher score for bitter, for example, means that a person is likelier to perceive bitter tastes more strongly — a trait that could make certain foods seem overwhelmingly bitter and not appealing.

After creating this scoring system, the researchers then compared polygenic taste scores with both diet quality and and cardiometabolic risk factors for 6,230 participants in a large study called the Framingham Heart Study. The cardiometabolic factors included blood pressure, blood glucose, waist circumference, and blood triglyceride and HDL (high-density lipoprotein, or “good”) cholesterol levels.

Links between taste perception and food choices

The researchers found certain links between taste perception and both food choices and cardiometabolic risk factors. Bitter and umami taste perception played the largest role in food choices, while sweet taste perception was more closely linked to cardiometabolic risk factors. Participants with the highest polygenic bitter taste score, for example, ate about two fewer servings of whole grains each week than participants with the lowest bitter taste score. A higher umami taste score was linked to eating fewer servings of vegetables, while a higher sweet taste score was linked to lower triglyceride levels.

“Considering taste perception could help make personalized nutrition guidance more effective by identifying drivers of poor food choices and helping people learn how to minimize their influence,” said study author Julie E. Gervis, a doctoral candidate in the Cardiovascular Nutrition Lab at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, in the press release. “Going forward, it will be important to try to replicate these findings in different groups of people so that we can understand the bigger picture and better determine how to use this information to devise personalized dietary advice.”

Want to learn more about eating well? Read “Strategies for Healthy Eating,” “Improving Your Recipes: One Step at a Time,” and “Easy Ways to Eat Better.”

Quinn Phillips

Quinn Phillips

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A freelance health writer and editor based in Wisconsin, Phillips has a degree from Harvard University. He is a former Editorial Assistant for Diabetes Self-Management and has years of experience covering diabetes and related health conditions. Phillips writes on a variety of topics, but is especially interested in the intersection of health and public policy.

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