Washington DC [USA], Jul 24 (ANI): Researchers have identified more than 500 genes that appear to directly affect the food we eat in one of the first comprehensive studies of food-related genes. This result represents a significant step in manipulating human genetics to create a balanced diet that improves health or prevents disease. The UK Biobank, which holds information on 500,000 people, was used by researchers to conduct the Phenome-Wide Association Study (PheWAS), which found that genes are associated with diet more than any other aspect of health or lifestyle. Genetic variants of interest in various human traits and behaviors, including eating, were analyzed by PheWAS. "Some of the genes we discovered are associated with emotional pathways - including those for taste, smell and texture - and can increase the reward response in the brain," said research team leader Joanne Cole, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "Because some of these genes may have clear pathways to a person's liking or disliking of food, they can be used to create a genetic profile to make dietary recommendations based on what foods a person likes to eat." "The food we choose to eat is as much an environmental factor as our culture, economic status, and access to food," Cole said. "Because genetics play a much smaller role in influencing food intake than any environmental factor, we need to study hundreds of thousands of people to determine the genetic influence between environmental factors. The data needed to do this was not available until recently. Cole presented the findings at NUTRITION 2023, the flagship annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition held July 22-25 in Boston. The challenge in identifying genetics related to diet is that what people eat is linked to many other factors, including health factors such as high cholesterol or body weight and even economic status. In this new work, the researchers applied mathematical techniques to isolate the specific effects of genetic variants that affect food intake and separate rare ones such as genetic sites that affect diabetes and diabetes sites that make people eat less sugar. The design of this study is possible because the UK Biobank not only contains genetic information, but also complete health and socioeconomic data. This allowed researchers to test individual genes for associations with thousands of traits and exclude genes that were not clearly associated with other factors, such as diabetes mellitus. The study showed about 300 genes related to specific food intake and almost 200 genes associated with eating habits that combine different foods - for example, general fish consumption or fruit consumption. "Studies show that diets often have indirect genetic effects, meaning they are linked to many other factors," Cole said. "This shows how important it is not to study eating habits in a vacuum, because the impact of eating habits on human health can be completely mediated or confounded by other factors." In the short term, Cole is studying the newly identified food-related genes to better understand their function while working to identify even more genes that directly influence food preferences. She would like to pursue several lines of translational research based on these results. For example, he wants to study whether using human genes to improve the taste of a diet designed for weight loss can make people stick to it. It may also be possible to use this new knowledge to tailor foods to the human genetic makeup. "If we know that the gene that encodes the olfactory receptor in the nose causes a person to like fruit and stimulates a reward response in the brain, then molecular analysis of the receptor can be used to identify natural or synthetic compounds that bind to it," said Cole. "Then we can see if adding one of these compounds to a healthy diet makes those foods more appealing to that person."