Savory Food Liking

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

7/10 confidence.

About Savory Food Liking

APOE's day job is packaging fat for transport around the body, and it is one of the most studied genes in human genetics. This card reads it for something quite different: a UK Biobank survey of well over a hundred thousand people found this position attached to a whole cluster of food liking at once - beef, lamb, liver, roast chicken, seafood, dairy and rich savory food generally. One position lining up with eleven related answers is more convincing than any one of them alone.

Good to know: Thirteen separate food questions pointed the same way, which is unusual for food liking. APOE's main job is packaging fat for transport, which may be why it appears around rich food. What you grew up eating shapes food liking far more than this does.

Fun fact: The same survey grouped 150 individual food questions into a handful of clusters, because people who like one rich savory food reliably like the others.

Discovery: The UK Biobank food-liking survey was published in 2023.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: APOE

Variant (rsID): rs429358

Location: Chr 19:44,908,684

dbSNP rs429358

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

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.

Fullness Signaling: A marker near the leptin gene, which produces the hormone fat tissue uses to tell the brain how much energy is stored.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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