Reasons you might love coffee more than soda

A study published in Human Molecular Genetics suggests that taste preferences for bitter or sweet beverages aren’t based on variations in our taste genes, but rather genes related to the psychoactive properties of these beverages. “People like the way coffee and alcohol make them feel. That’s why they drink it. It's not the taste,” said Marilyn Cornelis, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

For the study, beverages were categorized into a bitter-tasting group and a sweet-tasting group. Bitter included coffee, tea, grapefruit juice, beer, red wine, and liquor. Sweet included sugar-sweetened beverages, artificially sweetened beverages, and nongrapefruit juices. Beverage intake was collected using 24-hour dietary recalls or questionnaires. The researchers counted the number of servings of these bitter and sweet beverages consumed by about 336,000 individuals in the UK Biobank. Then, they did a genome-wide association study of bitter beverage consumption and of sweet beverage consumption. Lastly, they looked to replicate their key findings in three U.S. cohorts.

The researchers did find one variant in a gene, called FTO, linked to sugar-sweetened drinks. People who had a variant in the FTO gene—the same variant previously related to lower risk of obesity—surprisingly preferred sugar-sweetened beverages.

The study highlights important behavior-reward components to beverage choice and adds to our understanding of the link between genetics and beverage consumption—and the potential barriers to intervening in people’s diets, said Cornelis.

“To our knowledge, this is the first genome-wide association study of beverage consumption based on taste perspective,” said Victor Zhong, the study’s first author and postdoctoral fellow in preventive medicine at Northwestern. “It’s also the most comprehensive genome-wide association study of beverage consumption to date.”

Abstract