People who have survived a heart attack often receive detailed advice about what to eat and drink, yet the advice is rarely tailored to the individual. A new study suggests that part of the answer may lie in the genes that govern how intensely we taste. Among more than 4,000 Dutch adults with a prior myocardial infarction, genetic variants previously linked to bitter and sweet taste perception were associated with how often participants reported drinking coffee and tea, eating legumes, vegetables and dairy, and even with habits such as adding sugar or full-fat milk to coffee. The work, published in Genes & Nutrition, is one of the first to test whether taste-related genetic variants matter for eating behavior in a patient population with established cardiovascular disease.
The analysis drew on the Alpha Omega Cohort, a study of Dutch adults aged 60 to 80 who had experienced a clinically diagnosed myocardial infarction within the ten years, on average four years, before enrollment between 2002 and 2006. Of 4,837 participants enrolled at baseline, 4,204 had complete genotyping, dietary and confounder data and entered the analysis. Only 21 percent were female, and the average body mass index was 27.7 kg/m2. Most participants were former or never smokers, the large majority took blood pressure or lipid-lowering medication, and coffee was far more popular than tea in this group.
To capture the genetics of taste, the researchers selected variants that prior genome-wide association studies had connected with perception of the five basic tastes: sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami. Representative tastants were specified in advance for each taste, including sucrose for sweet, sodium chloride for salt, citric acid for sour, the bitter compounds PROP and PTC, and monopotassium glutamate for umami. Of 95 candidate variants, 39 passed the selection criteria and genetic quality control, including 22 sweet-related, 9 bitter-related, 4 umami-related, and 2 each for salt and sour. Each variant was coded additively according to the dosage of alleles associated with higher taste perception.
Dietary habits came from a 203-item semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire covering intake during the previous month. The researchers collapsed individual items into 19 food and beverage groups, such as vegetables, fruits, legumes, dairy, coffee, tea and sugar-sweetened beverages, and defined seven taste-modifying behaviors, including adding sugar, creamer or milk to coffee and adding sugar to cappuccino or tea. Using multivariable regression models adjusted for age, sex, total energy intake and the top five genetic principal components, they tested each variant against each dietary outcome, applying Bonferroni-corrected significance thresholds to guard against false positives.
The results were striking in their breadth. Thirty-two of the 39 taste-related variants showed nominal associations, at p < 0.05, with at least one food or beverage group or taste-modifying behavior, and five variant-diet associations survived Bonferroni adjustment. The strongest signals centered on rs1726866, a functional variant in the TAS2R38 bitter taste receptor gene. Each additional G allele, which is tied to higher bitter perception, was associated with about 1.1 fewer servings of coffee per week and about 1.0 more servings of tea per week. The authors note that concordant coffee and tea findings in the UK Biobank, a population-based cohort of roughly half a million adults, provide independent replication of this association.
Other associations that passed the stringent threshold linked bitter-related variant rs6761655 with less frequent legume intake, sweet-related variant rs7602024 with more frequent red and orange vegetable intake, and sweet-related variant rs994178 with more frequent full-fat dairy intake. A bitter-related variant was also associated with less frequent addition of full-fat milk to coffee; among coffee drinkers, each additional G allele of rs1726866 was associated with 0.79 fewer servings per week of full-fat milk added to coffee after adjustment for coffee intake. Most of these associations remained significant after further adjustment for body mass index, smoking, alcohol use, physical activity and education, although the coffee association was modestly attenuated under the fullest model.
The study also probed behaviors that people use to modify the taste of their drinks. Among participants reporting each behavior, individuals carrying the GG genotype of rs1726866, which corresponds to higher bitter perception, added less full-fat milk to coffee than those with GA or AA genotypes. Interestingly, GG individuals were somewhat more likely to drink tea and coffee at all, suggesting that higher bitter perception did not simply drive avoidance of bitter beverages in this cohort. The researchers point out that cultural context matters here: associations between this variant and milk coffee or dietary fat intake have not been consistently reproduced in US or other European cohorts, possibly reflecting differences in coffee and tea drinking customs and in the dairy options available to consumers.
Exploratory analyses hinted at sex-specific effects. Five variant-by-sex interactions reached p < 0.05, and two passed a more stringent Bonferroni-corrected threshold: sweet-related variant rs994178 with low-fat cheese intake and sour-related variant rs837231 with other vegetable intake, both driven by associations among females but not males. A significant interaction also emerged for rs1726866 and adding sugar to tea, with each additional G allele associated with less sugar added among females but more among males, though the effect sizes were small. The authors speculate that sex differences in taste perception, neural responses to taste stimuli, or higher tobacco exposure among the men, which may blunt taste perception, could contribute, but the mechanisms remain unknown.
The researchers are careful about what these findings do and do not show. The cross-sectional design prevents any causal inference, and because taste perception was not directly measured in the cohort, the team could not confirm that the variants actually capture taste intensity in these patients. Dietary data were self-reported and therefore subject to recall bias, the questionnaire, while based on a validated instrument, was not itself formally validated, and the focus on older Dutch adults with a prior myocardial infarction limits generalizability. Statistical power was constrained by the modest sample size and the unequal sex distribution, and common medication use and chronic inflammation, which can alter taste perception, may have diluted the detectable genetic signal. Several of the newly associated variants also map to genes with no known role in ingestive behavior, so the authors call for replication and experimental work to determine whether these loci reflect genuine sensory mechanisms or spurious findings.
Even with those caveats, the study opens a concrete line of inquiry for precision nutrition in cardiovascular care. By focusing on variants discovered through taste perception rather than through diet itself, the authors argue, the analysis targets upstream predictors of food choice that may have more plausible direct effects than the highly pleiotropic loci emerging from large dietary genome-wide studies. If the associations hold up in independent cohorts, taste-related variants could eventually help clinicians anticipate which patients gravitate toward bitter beverages, sweet-leaning food choices, or particular coffee and tea habits, and tailor secondary-prevention dietary advice accordingly. For now, the message is a measured one: the genetics of how intensely we taste bitter and sweet appear to leave measurable fingerprints on what Dutch heart attack survivors eat and drink, and understanding those fingerprints may make dietary counseling for secondary cardiovascular risk reduction somewhat more personal.
Subject of Research: Associations of taste-perception genetic variants with food and beverage intake habits in Dutch adults with a prior myocardial infarction
Article Title: Genetic variations underlying bitter and sweet taste perception are associated with food and beverage intake habits and taste-modifying behaviors among Dutch adults with a prior myocardial infarction
Article References: Gervis, J. E., Mars, M., Pertiwi, K., Heerkens, L., Lichtenstein, A. H., & Geleijnse, J. M. (2026). Genetic variations underlying bitter and sweet taste perception are associated with food and beverage intake habits and taste-modifying behaviors among Dutch adults with a prior myocardial infarction. Genes & Nutrition, 21(1), Article 24. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12263-026-00814-y
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s12263-026-00814-y
Keywords: taste genetics, TAS2R38, bitter taste perception, coffee intake, tea intake, Alpha Omega Cohort, myocardial infarction, precision nutrition, genome-wide association study, dietary habits, sex-specific effects, cardiovascular disease
News Source: Juliet Wilcox. (October 29, 2026). Taste Genes Shape Coffee and Tea Habits in Heart Attack Survivors. Scienmag.
