Assistant Professor University of Colorado School of Medicine Aurora, Colorado, United States
Disclosure(s): No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.
Disclosure(s):
Joanne B. Cole, PhD: No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.
Objectives: Despite widespread dietary guidelines and knowledge on healthy eating, suboptimal nutrition remains pervasive due to many factors that impact eating behavior. Though effective policy interventions are critical to reduce structural barriers to healthy eating, targeting individual dietary preferences based on biological mechanisms (e.g. taste and digestion) provides a unique strategy for personalized nutrition which can empower individuals to modify their eating habits.
Methods: The biological basis of dietary preferences is rooted in common human genetic variation that impacts individual perception. We previously published the largest and most comprehensive genomic analysis of dietary intake to date which identified 814 genomic loci. However, given dietary intake is often confounded by correlation with many other traits, we conducted a Phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) for each locus in >4000 diverse health and lifestyle traits in UK Biobank to identify loci that act directly on dietary intake (and not via a mediator like body mass index).
Results: We identified 481/814 loci (194 linked to dietary patterns and 287 to specific foods) which demonstrated stronger more direct effects on dietary intake than any other lifestyle and health trait. Specific foods with >10 ‘direct’ loci include adding salt to food, water intake, fish intake, alcohol intake, and fruit intake. Among the top ‘direct’ loc we found taste receptor genes (TAS2R38), olfactory receptor genes (OR10A6, OR8U8), and genes that encode for digestive and metabolic enzymes (AMY1A amylase gene).
Conclusions: To fully understand and utilize the spectrum of taste-related genes and pathways in precision nutrition, rigorous analyses that both discover and interrogate genomic loci associated with diet-related traits is required. Our analysis which begins to decipher the biological genes and pathways that directly connect genotype to dietary intake paves the way for translational mechanistic and human studies and highlights the potential for implementing genomics into novel precision nutrition strategies.
