Potato Chip Liking

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

5/10 confidence.

About Potato Chip Liking

A UK Biobank survey asked well over a hundred thousand people how much they liked a long list of foods. Potato chips came out weakly attached to this position, which sits in a long non-coding RNA region near MEF2C - the same broad region that turns up for spicy food, though the two were compared in our own genomes and travel together only weakly, so they count as separate signals. The reported difference is about three hundredths of a point on the nine point liking scale the survey used, which is small even by the standards of that survey.

Good to know: In the survey potato chips scored around the middle of the range, and the measured difference between results is a few hundredths of a point on that scale. This sits in the same non-coding region as the spicy food card, but linkage was measured and they are independent. The survey recorded what people said rather than what they ate.

Fun fact: The appeal of potato chips is often put down to the combination of salt, fat and a loud crunch, which together hit several senses at once.

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

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: LINC00461

Variant (rsID): rs4916723

Location: Chr 5:88,558,577

dbSNP rs4916723

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

Savory Food Liking: A change in APOE linked, in a very large food survey, to how much people report liking meat, dairy and rich savory food as a group.

Sugar Intake: A change in FTO linked to how much total sugar people report eating, and to how sweet things are perceived.

Sweet Tooth: A variant in the FGF21 hormone gene, linked in several studies to a stronger preference for sweet foods.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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