Loving the taste of a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning could be inherited from your ancestors.
A recent large-scale study identified six new genetic variants associated with coffee drinking, the Harvard School of Public Health reported. The findings could help explain why coffee and caffeine have different effects on different people and could reveal links between coffee and health.
"Coffee and caffeine have been linked to beneficial and adverse health effects. Our findings may allow us to identify subgroups of people most likely to benefit from increasing or decreasing coffee consumption for optimal health," said Marilyn Cornelis, research associate in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study.
Researchers have though genetics were involved in the individual effects of coffee, but have not been able to pinpoint what these factors were.
To make their findings researchers conducted a genome-wide meta-analysis of more than 120,000 regular coffee drinkers of European and African American ancestry. The analysis, which was part of the Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium, allowed the team to identify two genetic variants that mapped to genes involved in caffeine metabolism. These genes, dubbed BDNF and SLC6A4, are believed to be linked to the rewarding effects of coffee while two previously-known genes (GCKR and MLXIPL) are involved in glucose and lipid metabolism.
These findings suggests the strongest genetic factors linked to high coffee consumption work by increasing caffeine metabolism.
"The new candidate genes are not the ones we have focused on in the past, so this is an important step forward in coffee research," Cornelis said.
"Like previous genetic analyses of smoking and alcohol consumption, this research serves as an example of how genetics can influence some types of habitual behavior," said Daniel Chasman, associate professor at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the study's senior author.
The sysudy was published Oct.7 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
