WARNING: the interactive features of this website use CSS3, which your browser does not support. To use the full features of this website, please update your browser.
Dietary intake is a major contributor to the global obesity epidemic and represents a complex behavioural phenotype that is partially affected by innate biological differences. Here, we present a multivariate genome-wide association analysis of overall variation in dietary intake to account for the correlation between dietary carbohydrate, fat and protein in 282,271 participants of European ancestry from the UK Biobank (n = 191,157) and Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology Consortium (n = 91,114), and identify 26 distinct genome-wide significant loci. Dietary intake signals map exclusively to specific brain regions and are enriched for genes expressed in specialized subtypes of GABAergic, dopaminergic and glutamatergic neurons. We identified two main clusters of genetic variants for overall variation in dietary intake that were differently associated with obesity and coronary artery disease. These results enhance the biological understanding of interindividual differences in dietary intake by highlighting neural mechanisms, supporting functional follow-up experiments and possibly providing new avenues for the prevention and treatment of prevalent complex metabolic diseases.
9 Keywords
Diet
Genetic Loci
Genome-Wide Association Study
Genotype
Humans
Nuclear Proteins
Obesity
Phenotype
Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
20 Authors
Jordi Merino
Hassan S. Dashti
Chloé Sarnowski
Jacqueline M. Lane
Petar V. Todorov
Miriam S. Udler
Yanwei Song
Heming Wang
Jaegil Kim
Chandler Tucker
John Campbell
Toshiko Tanaka
Audrey Y. Chu
Linus Tsai
Tune H. Pers
Daniel I. Chasman
Martin K. Rutter
Josée Dupuis
Jose C. Florez
Richa Saxena
Enabling scientific discoveries that improve human health