The genetics of eating behaviors: research in the age of COVID-19

  1. Mackenzie E. Hannum
  2. Cailu Lin
  3. Katherine Bell
  4. Aurora Toskala
  5. Riley Koch
  6. Tharaka Galaniha
  7. Alissa Nolden
  8. Danielle R Reed
  9. Paule Joseph

Reviewed by

Read the full article See related articles

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

How much pleasure we take in eating is more than just how much we enjoy the taste of food. Food involvement – the amount of time we spend on food beyond the immediate act of eating and tasting – is key to the human food experience. We took a biological approach to test whether food-related behaviors, together capturing food involvement, have genetic components and are partly due to inherited variation. We collected data via an internet survey from a genetically informative sample of 419 adult twins (114 monozygotic twin pairs, 31 dizygotic twin pairs, and 129 singletons). Because we conducted this research during the pandemic, we also ascertained how many participants had experienced COVID-19-associated loss of taste and smell. Since these respondents had previously participated in research in person, we measured their level of engagement to evaluate the quality of their online responses. Additive genetics explained 16-44% of the variation in some measures of food involvement, most prominently various aspects of cooking, suggesting some features of the human food experience may be inborn. Other features reflected shared (early) environment, captured by respondents’ twin status. About 6% of participants had a history of COVID-19 infection, many with transitory taste and smell loss, but all but one had recovered before the survey. Overall, these results suggest that people may have inborn as well as learned variations in their involvement with food. We also learned to adapt to research during a pandemic by considering COVID-19 status and measuring engagement in online studies of human eating behavior.

Article activity feed

  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.03.458854: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: Protocols compiled with the Declaration of Helsinki and were approved by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board (Protocol #843798).
    Consent: All subjects provided informed consent to the research before starting the online survey.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    For data collection, we used this contact information to invite each twin to complete on online survey (described below) via REDCap, an electronic data capture tool used often in biomedical research (Harris, et al., 2009).
    REDCap
    suggested: (REDCap, RRID:SCR_003445)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    This research has at least two limitations. First, because of our recruitment strategy – former attendees and research participants from an annual festival for twins – we had more genetically identical than fraternal twin pairs, which might reduce our power to detect additive genetic variance. Second, some twins responded but their co-twin did not. We attribute this situation to two factors (neither of which was in our immediate control): some contact information was outdated, so we could not reach the co-twin; and the vicissitudes of COVID-19 and the pandemic, with constant upheaval and changes, made it hard for some to prioritize participating in research. These singletons are not without value, because they provided information for estimating the effects of covariates and also about variation when computing heritability. However, we recognize that it would be more valuable from a genetics perspective to have all twin pairs in our sample rather than include singletons. The heritable variations we identified in interest and liking for cooking and food preparation are not surprising, if we consider that cooking is often a recreational or leisure activity, like competitive or team sports, which are often related to heritable traits (e.g., (van der Zee, Helmer, Boomsma, Dolan, & de Geus, 2020)). However, this observation takes on new importance in the realm of health, because the willingness to cook and prepare food at home is related to better overall health (Wolfson & Bleich,...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.09.03.458854v1 on bioRxiv