Coffee Intake

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

10/10 confidence.

About Coffee Intake

AHR is a sensor that switches on the liver enzymes which break caffeine down, including CYP1A2. People who clear caffeine faster tend to drink more of it, because a cup does less for them and lasts less long. That is why this position keeps turning up in studies of how many cups a day people report, in samples running to hundreds of thousands. It describes a tendency across large groups rather than a rule about you, and habit, taste and sleep matter more than any one letter.

Good to know: The effect is a fraction of a cup a day on average, not a rule about you. AHR switches on the liver enzymes that clear caffeine, which is why it shows up in coffee habits. How much coffee suits you is better judged by your sleep than by your genotype.

Fun fact: Coffee intake is one of the most reliably replicated behavioral traits in genetics, largely because it is easy to ask about and people remember the answer.

Discovery: AHR was linked to coffee and caffeine intake in 2011.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: AHR

Variant (rsID): rs4410790

Location: Chr 7:17,244,953

dbSNP rs4410790

The studies

Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies regions on 7p21 (AHR) and 15q24 (CYP1A2) as determinants of habitual caffeine consumption (Cornelis MC et al., PLoS genetics, 2011)

Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies six novel loci associated with habitual coffee consumption (Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium et al., Molecular psychiatry, 2015)

Comprehensive genomic analysis of dietary habits in UK Biobank identifies hundreds of genetic associations (Cole JB et al., Nature communications, 2020)

Coffee Consumption and Kidney Function: A Mendelian Randomization Study (Kennedy OJ et al., American journal of kidney diseases : the official journal of the National Kidney Foundation, 2020)

Other lifestyle traits

Fresh Fruit Preference: A change near a transcription factor, linked in a very large survey to how much fresh fruit people report eating.

Water Intake: A change in a large calcium-release gene, linked in a UK Biobank survey to how many glasses of water people report drinking.

Spicy Food Liking: A change in a long non-coding RNA region near MEF2C, linked in a very large survey to how much people say they enjoy spicy food.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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