Your Coffee Love Actually Stems from Your Genes

Have you ever wondered why you and almost everyone you know uses a cup of coffee to kick-start their day? For a lot of people, it’s almost impossible to walk, talk or even function normally without their daily cup of coffee from their favourite café in Preston. Funnily enough, the root cause of this affinity, this addiction is much deeper than simply sleep-deprivation. It’s rather surprising, but coffee addiction does, in fact, find its home in your DNA!

The Genetic Variants Revealed

While it is obvious that the only factor causing the addiction cannot be genetics, they do play a surprisingly important part. Coffee culture, availability, environment and peer pressure are some other factors. You’d be surprised to hear that of all professions, journalists consume the largest volumes of coffee the world over. That said, a DNA analysis study in Molecular Psychiatry involving more than 120,000 people revealed that the subjects who consumed a lot of coffee had exactly six genetic variants common to one another. Two of these handle the efficient metabolism of caffeine, two more affecting certain energy metabolism aspects, and the last two influence the several benefits of caffeine.

The Cause of It All

What this implies is that people essentially moderate and regulate the amounts of coffee they consume on a daily basis based on their bodies’ inherent capability to handle caffeine. In other words, some people are indeed wired to process much more coffee than their peers. You are likely to see them hanging around or making multiple trips to the café in Preston which has become one of their favourite haunts almost every day. It’s almost a superpower- the ability to stay awake forever!

Genetics Sway Both Ways

A collaborative effort by Italian, Scottish and Dutch scientists have also revealed a particular DNA variation in the PDSS2 gene, which reduces the ability of the person’s cells to break caffeine down. On a macro-level, the people with this variation drink one cup less coffee than the average, because their body can hold the caffeine for a longer time, and can get the same sort of caffeine hit without drinking as much coffee as their overachieving peers.

This study directly correlates to a substantial amount of previous research which had identified the few genes linked to coffee-drinking habits and opens up new avenues of studying and understanding caffeine metabolism. This initial research was a comparative study of the coffee habits of 370 people in a small south-Italian village and 843 people across six villages in the north-east part of Italy.

Conclusion

This is yet another step into understanding how closely psychology and genetics are linked. Firstly, you can now chug your coffee at an amazing café in Preston with absolute contentment knowing that it is, in fact, great for health and keeps away a whole lot of rather nasty complications like type 2 diabetes, liver cirrhosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease and many more. Also, most importantly, what this revelation ends up saying is that your obsession with the drink wasn’t necessarily your fault, and neither is your friend’s inability or reluctance to consume the amounts of coffee you do.

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