Are you trying to resist the tempting aroma of your usual Café au lait? Don't you want to savor the creamy bitter taste of your Cappuccino anymore? Are you deleting your Caffe macchiato from your everyday drinks for good? All these you're trying hard so you can have a healthier life, but you can't seem to fight the attraction? Study reports show maybe it isn't about your desires anymore-maybe it's all about your genes.
A study, which was published in Scientific Reports, has a goal of debunking the "relationship between bitter taste perception and the consumption of coffee, tea and alcohol through a MR framework."
To uncover facts and information from this study, researchers examined the information of about 438,870 people from the UK Biobank. These people are between 37 to 73 years old.
Through the study, they were able to dig deep into the collection of the participants' gene profiles. Furthermore, the experts also focused on the type of beverage the participants are usually fond of drinking and also their daily rate of consumption.
Through the study, experts have analyzed three sets of data, which revolves around the European ancestry's genetic variants that can be linked "to the strength of perception of different tastes," according to Body and Soul. The first set of data has focused more on the ability of a person to perceive bitterness from caffeine, the second will be on the higher ratings of bitterness for quinine, which is an alkaloid found in cinchona trees, and the third will be for a drug named propylthiouracil, which is also called prop.
Data gathered revealed that people who have a greater genetic predisposition to take in the bitter taste of caffeine get fonder of the temptations of coffee. On the other hand, those that have an increased perception of the bitter taste of quinine and prop prefer drinking chamomile or green tea for their afternoon break rather than taking a sip of their Americano.
Dr. Marilyn Cornelis, Ph.D. of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, explained how this study would help us understand the psychological behavior of people over coffee and how they often can't get over with it no matter how much they resist.
"Given humans generally avoid bitter tastes, we interpret these findings as possibly a learned behavior: if we can perceive caffeine well we associate this with the psychostimulant properties of caffeine, and so seek more coffee," Cornelis added.
