The investigators hope that the discovery will point to new treatment strategies to curb the obesity epidemic
A team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), and other institutions have identified more than two dozen genetic regions that may affect individuals’ food intake.
“People with obesity and diabetes are often stigmatised for making unhealthy food choices. While food intake is shaped by many factors including social, demographic, religious, or political forces, previous studies have shown that inherited individual differences contribute to what, when, why, or how much we eat,” says co–lead author Jordi Merino, PhD, a research associate at the Diabetes Unit and Center for Genomic Medicine at MGH and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School.
To provide insights, Merino and his colleagues conducted a genetic analysis and examined the food consumption of 282,271 participants of European ancestry from the UK Biobank and the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium. The study is the largest to date to examine genetic factors related to food intake.
The team identified 26 genetic regions associated with increased preference for foods containing more fat, protein, or carbohydrate, and these regions were enriched for genes expressed in the brain.
The researchers also found that two main groups of genetic variants were differently associated with obesity and coronary artery disease.
The findings are likely to lead to a better biological understanding of why food consumption behavior differs among individuals, and they could provide new avenues for preventing and treating obesity and other metabolic diseases.