A large-scale investigation of diet-related genes at the University of Colorado discovered nearly 500 genes that appear to directly influence the food we eat.
The discovery represents an important step in developing precision nutrition strategies that help improve health or prevent disease using a person’s genetics.
The research results indicate that there are 300 genes directly associated with the consumption of specific foods and almost 200 genes linked to dietary patterns that group various foods.
How genes influence dietary patterns
Research team leader Joanne Cole, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine explains, “The study showed that dietary patterns tend to have more indirect genetic effects, which it means they were correlated with many other factors.”
While adding that “this shows how important it is not to study dietary patterns in a vacuum, because the impact of eating pattern on human health may be fully mediated or confounded by other factors.”
The short-term research is looking at “newly identified diet-related genes to better understand their function and, at the same time, work to identify even more genes that directly influence food preferences,” he says. Nutrition.
Cole explains that “some genes we identified are related to sensory pathways, including those for taste, smell, and texture, and may also increase the reward response in the brain.”
Genes can influence the type of food we craveCredit: Shutterstock
An important insight from this research is that “because some of these genes may have clear pathways to influence whether or not someone likes a food, they could potentially be used to create sensory genetic profiles to adjust a person’s dietary recommendations in function of the foods they like to eat.
To analyze the Phenomena-Wide Association Study (PheWAS) which identified genes more strongly associated with diet than with any health or lifestyle factor, the researchers used the UK Biobank, which contains data from 500,000 people.
Other influencing factors in nutritional patterns
“The foods we choose to eat are largely influenced by environmental factors such as our culture, socioeconomic status, and accessibility to food,” Cole said.
“Because genetics plays a much smaller role in influencing dietary intake than all environmental factors, we need to study hundreds of thousands of individuals to detect genetic influences amid environmental factors. The data needed to do this has not been available until recently.”
Eating oatmeal can help lower blood cholesterol levels. Credit: Vladislav Noseek | Shutterstock
Through computerized methods they seek to “discover the direct effects of genetic variants that affect diet and separate them from indirect effects, such as those in which a gene affects diabetes and having diabetes requires a person to eat less sugar.”
Cole explains that “if we know that a gene encoding an olfactory receptor in the nose increases a person’s taste for fruit and increases the reward response in the brain, then molecular studies of this receptor could be used to identify natural compounds or synthetics that are attached to it.
“So we could see if adding one of those compounds to healthy foods makes those foods more appealing to that person,” he adds.
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2023-07-30 19:00:00
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