Regular Consumption of Sugary Beverages Linked to Increased Genetic Risk of Obesity

“Our study for the first time pro­vides repro­ducible evi­dence from three prospec­tive cohorts to show genetic and dietary factors—sugar-sweetened beverages—may mutu­ally influ­ence their effects on body weight and obe­sity risk. The find­ings may moti­vate fur­ther research on inter­ac­tions between genomic vari­a­tion and envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors regard­ing human health,” said Lu Qi, assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH and senior author of the study.

In the past three decades, con­sump­tion of SSBs has increased dra­mat­i­cally world­wide. Although wide­spread evi­dence sup­ports a link between SSBs, obe­sity and chronic dis­eases such as dia­betes, there has been lit­tle research on whether envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, such as drink­ing sug­ary bev­er­ages, influ­ence genetic pre­dis­po­si­tion to obesity.

The research was based on data from three large cohorts, 121,700 women in the Nurses’ Health Study, 51,529 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and 25,000 in the Women’s Genome Health Study. All of the par­tic­i­pants had com­pleted food-frequency ques­tion­naires detail­ing their food and drink con­sump­tion over time.

The researchers ana­lyzed data from 6,934 women from NHS, 4,423 men from HPFS, and 21,740 women from WGHS who were of European ances­try and for whom geno­type data based on genome-wide asso­ci­a­tion stud­ies were available.

Participants were divided into four groups accord­ing to how many sug­ary drinks they con­sumed: less than one serv­ing of SSB per month, between 1-4 serv­ings per month, between 2-6 serv­ings per week, and one or more serv­ings per day. To rep­re­sent the over­all genetic pre­dis­po­si­tion, a genetic pre­dis­po­si­tion score was cal­cu­lated on the basis of the 32 single-nucleotide poly­mor­phisms known to be asso­ci­ated with BMI (weight in kilo­grams divided by the square of the height in meters).

The results showed that the genetic effects on BMI and obe­sity risk among those who drank one or more SSBs per day were about twice as large as those who con­sumed less than one serv­ing per month.

The find­ings sug­gest that reg­u­lar con­sump­tion of sug­ary bev­er­ages may amplify the genetic risk of obe­sity. In addi­tion, indi­vid­u­als with greater genetic pre­dis­po­si­tion to obe­sity appear to be more sus­cep­ti­ble to harm­ful effects of SSBs on BMI. “SSBs are one of the dri­ving forces behind the obe­sity epi­demic,” says Frank Hu, pro­fes­sor of nutri­tion and epi­demi­ol­ogy at HSPH and a coau­thor of this study. “The impli­ca­tion of our study is that the genetic effects of obe­sity can be off­set by health­ier food and bev­er­age choices.”

Source: Harvard School of Public Health release