Genetic and environmental influences on sweet taste liking and related traits : new insights from twin cohorts

Abstract

Reducing sugar intake is a key component of global health policies and dietary guidelines. However, individuals vary substantially in sweet-liking, commonly characterized by sweet-liking status (extreme sweet-likers, moderate sweet-likers, and sweet-dislikers), yet the heritability of these categories remains unexplored. Monozygotic and dizygotic twins from Finland (FinnTwin12; n = 468; 60% female, aged 21–24) and the UK (TwinsUK; n = 967; 90% female, aged 18–81) rated their liking and perceived intensity of a 20% (w/v) sucrose solution, reported their liking and consumption-frequency of food and beverages and completed additional behavioral, eating and personality measures. We estimated the contribution of additive genetic (A), nonadditive genetic (D), shared (C), and unshared environmental factors (E) in the variance and covariance of sweet-liking (defined ordinally through sweet-liking status and continuously) with related traits to see if they share similar proportions of genetic and environmental factors. Model-fitting indicated 30–48% of the variability in sweet-liking was attributed to (A) additive genetic factors and 52–70% to (E) environmental exposures not shared by siblings. Importantly, such AE models consistently fit best, regardless of sex, cohort, or sweet-liking assessment method. Broadly, correlations between sweet-liking and behavioral, eating, and personality measures were modest (–0.19 to 0.21), mostly positive and largely driven by shared genetic rather than environmental factors, with the strongest relationship seen for reported liking, consumption-frequency and craving for sweet foods. We demonstrate that unshared environment modulates individual differences in sweet-liking alongside a substantial genetic component that is partly shared with reported liking, consumption-frequency and craving for sweet foods.