Why does people's coffee psyche change and why do some people feel like they can't get through the day without their favorite drink, while others are happy with just one cup or even abstain completely. New research suggests that aintensive coffee consumptionis influenced by a positive feedback loop between genetics and environment.
Coffee Psyche and Behavioral Genetics
This phenomenon is known as specific heritability. It is also with thecholesterol levels and body weightand probably plays a role in other physiological behavioral characteristics of humans that defy easy explanation.
“It appears that environmental factors form the basis for your genes to have an effect,” said Paul Williams. He is a statistician at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Your environment may cause you to drink more coffee, just as your colleagues or your spouse do. The genes you have to like coffee then exert a greater influence. These two effects are synergistic.”
Williams' results come from an analysis of 4,788 married couples and 2,380 siblings. This study examined how lifestyle and genetics affect cardiovascular disease. Participants, all related to an original group, submitted detailed information about diet, exercise, medication use and medical history every three to five years. Data from the study has been used in thousands of investigations into many facets of human health.
Study results
The analysis found that between 36% and 58% of coffee consumption is genetically determined. However, the exact causative genes remain unknown. So William's hypothesis is based on the fact that drinking coffee is a specific trait of genetics. The correlation between a parent's coffee psyche and an offspring's coffee drinking is becoming increasingly stronger when it comes to the consumption of the drink. For example, the amount changes from zero cups consumed per day to one to five or even more cups consumed.
“When we started decoding the human genome, we thought we could read the DNA. This would allow us to understand how genes behave and lead to diseases and the like. But that’s not how it works,” Williams said. “For many traits, like coffee drinking, we know that they have a strong genetic component. We have known about the coffee psyche in families since the 1960s. But when we actually start looking at the DNA itself, we usually find a very small connection. The percentage of variation in traits can be attributed to genes alone.”
The traditional assumption in genetic research has been that environment and lifestyle alter gene expression in a consistent and measurable manner, ultimately producing the outward manifestation of a trait. The statistical work in theStudyvon Williams shows that the situation is more complex. This explains the diversity of features we see in the real world.
