You might love sugary doughnuts, but your friends find them too sweet and only take small nibbles. That’s partly because your genes influence how you perceive sweetness and how much sugary food and drink you consume.
What We Know
When food touches our taste buds, taste receptors produce a signal that travels along taste nerves to the brain. This generates a sensation of flavor and helps us decide if we like the food.Genetic research in the past decade has largely focused on genes for sweet taste receptors and whether variation in these genes influences how sensitive we are to sweetness and how much sugar we eat and drink.
What Our Latest Study Found
Our new study looked at data from 176,867 people of European ancestry from Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.After a 15-year study, we showed that several genes (other than those related to sweet taste receptors) have a stronger impact on how we perceive sweetness and how much sugar we eat and drink.
We believe a similar situation may be influencing our sugar habit; genes near the FTO gene may be acting in the brain to regulate how much sugar we eat.
Why We Love Sweet Foods
Our natural enjoyment of sweet foods could be an evolutionary hangover. Scientists believe being able to taste sweetness might have helped our ancestors identify energy-rich food, which played a critical part in their survival.However, being able to taste sweetness doesn’t always mean you prefer to eat lots of sweet-tasting food.
Regional Differences
We were surprised to find that genes for sweet taste receptors had no effect on either the ability to taste sweetness or on the amount of sugar consumed in our study, which looked only at large populations of European descent.So, How Can We Use This?
Just like genetics can help explain why some people choose tea over coffee, our latest study helps explain why some people prefer sweet food. That could lead to personalized diets to improve people’s eating habits based on their genetics.However, genetics is not the only factor to influence your taste for sugary foods and how much of these you eat or drink. So you can’t always blame your genes if you’ve ever tried to quit sugary drinks or snacks and failed, it just may mean you have to work harder than the average person.