Do you prefer tea or coffee? The answer is in your genes: Study shows people more sensitive to coffee’s bitterness ironically like it the most
- Research has shown bitterness alerts humans to poisoning
- That’s why scientists from Northwestern and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute were intrigued by coffee
People who are more sensitive to coffee’s acrid, bitter taste ironically like it more.
Bitterness is supposed to set off alarm bells for our body that something could be poisonous or dangerous.
It means nobody should like coffee, which can vary in flavor depending on the bean but always has a sour undertone.
And yet, somehow humans have learned to ignore our usual instinct – and scientists have found that those who are most sensitive to bitterness tend to like coffee even more.
The conundrum all boils down to a bizarre genetic twist, scientists say: we have all learned that coffee triggers a happy buzz – and that understanding has been passed down through generations.
People with genetic sensitivity to bitterness seemed to associate coffee with happiness more than others who were less sensitive
Co-author Professor Marilyn Cornelis, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in the United States, said: ‘You’d expect that people who are particularly sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee.
‘The opposite results of our study suggest coffee consumers acquire a taste or an ability to detect caffeine due to the learned positive reinforcement, i.e. stimulation, elicited by caffeine.
‘In other words, people who have a heightened ability to taste coffee’s bitterness, and particularly the distinct bitter flavor of caffeine, learn to associate good things with it.’
The study is one of the first and the largest to dig into the mechanics of taste.
Taste has been studied for decades, if not centuries, but we are still largely in the dark as to how and why we react to certain tastes.
Often, it’s for evolutionary purposes – bitterness being one of the classic ones.
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Plenty of research has shown bitterness is a red flag to humans for poisoning.
And that is what led this team from Northwestern, working with scientists at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia, to be intrigued by coffee.
‘We want to understand it from a biological standpoint,’ Dr Cornelis said.
The team applied Mendelian randomization – a technique commonly used to study disease – to test the causal relationship between bitter taste and beverage consumption.
They looked at more than 400,000 men and women in the United Kingdom.
The genetic variants linked to caffeine, quinine and PROP perception were previously studied during analysis of Australian twins.
These genetic variants were then tested for associations with self-reported consumption of coffee, tea and alcohol in the current study.
To their surprise, people with genetic sensitivity to bitterness seemed to associate coffee with happiness more than others who were less sensitive.
Those people tended to drink a lot of coffee – and also consumed low amounts of tea (but that could just be because they were too busy drinking coffee, Dr Cornelis said).
‘The findings suggest our perception of bitter tastes, informed by our genetics, contributes to the preference for coffee, tea and alcohol,’ she said.
It is not universal: many people sensitive to bitter flavors of quinine (found in tonic water) and PROP (similar to sprouts and broccoli) said they avoided coffee.
Many of them, particularly those sensitive to PROP also drank less alcohol – and more specifically, tended to avoid red wine.
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