Spicy Food Liking

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

5/10 confidence.

About Spicy Food Liking

This position sits in a stretch of chromosome 5 that does not code for a protein but does regulate nearby genes, MEF2C among them. It turned up in a UK Biobank survey that asked well over a hundred thousand people how much they liked a long list of foods, where it came out attached to curry and chili peppers together. A separate UK Biobank study of what people actually drink linked the same version to red wine intake. Liking spicy food is mostly learned - it is one of the clearest cases of an acquired taste - so read this as a very faint background nudge, not a preference.

Good to know: The measured differences here are very small, so treat it as a curiosity. Liking chili heat is largely learned, which is why the same genes do so little. The burn from chili is a pain signal, not a taste, and the brain can learn to enjoy it.

Fun fact: Chili heat is detected by the same receptor that responds to physical heat, which is why a hot curry genuinely feels warm.

Discovery: Food-liking associations at this locus came out of a UK Biobank survey published in 2022.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: LINC00461

Variant (rsID): rs6882046

Location: Chr 5:88,673,046

dbSNP rs6882046

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)

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

Other lifestyle traits

Breakfast Food Liking: A change near a brain adhesion gene, linked in a very large food survey to liking for typical breakfast foods.

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.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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