Breakfast Food Liking

Your result, the one DNA position behind it, and what the research says.

6/10 confidence.

About Breakfast Food Liking

A UK Biobank survey asked well over a hundred thousand people how much they liked a long list of foods, and researchers grouped the answers into factors - clusters of foods that people tend to like together. One of those clusters is a small one, holding whole grain cereals, honey, porridge and soy milk. Fruit forms a cluster of its own in the same map. This position sits near NEGR1, a gene involved in how neurons stick together, and came out weakly attached to that cluster.

Good to know: Food liking was surveyed by questionnaire, so this measures what people say rather than what they eat. The measured difference between genotypes is small next to habit and what is available. Liking for most foods is heavily learned, especially in childhood.

Fun fact: Researchers asked about 139 separate foods and grouped the answers into dozens of nested factors, because people who like one porridge-shaped food tend to like the others too.

Discovery: Food-liking factors were mapped genome-wide in UK Biobank in 2022.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: NEGR1

Variant (rsID): rs3101336

Location: Chr 1:72,285,502

dbSNP rs3101336

The studies

Large-scale GWAS of food liking reveals genetic determinants and genetic correlations with distinct neurophysiological traits (May-Wilson S et al., Nature communications, 2022)

Other lifestyle traits

Carbohydrate Preference: A change near a gene controlling how the liver stores glycogen, linked to the share of energy people take as carbohydrate.

Cheese Preference: A change near an appetite-related gene, linked in a very large survey to how much cheese people report eating.

Orange Liking: A change in the gene for the receptor of a gut hormone released after eating, linked in a large survey to liking for oranges.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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