Sugar Intake

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

6/10 confidence.

About Sugar Intake

FTO is the best known of the appetite genes, and its usual headline is body weight. This card reads it for something narrower: the total amount of sugar people report eating, which came out of a genome-wide study of how sweet substances are both perceived and consumed. Wanting sweet things and tasting them strongly are different questions, and this position sits closer to the wanting.

Good to know: Wanting sweet things and tasting them strongly are different questions. What is in reach shapes sugar intake far more than genotype does. This is one narrow question from a gene better known for something else.

Fun fact: Sweetness is the one taste humans are born actively seeking - newborns show a preference for it before they have tasted anything else.

Discovery: Sweet perception and intake were mapped genome-wide in 2019.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: FTO

Variant (rsID): rs11642841

Location: Chr 16:53,811,575

dbSNP rs11642841

The studies

New insight into human sweet taste: a genome-wide association study of the perception and intake of sweet substances (Hwang LD et al., The American journal of clinical nutrition, 2019)

Other lifestyle traits

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.

Coffee Intake: A change near the gene for the receptor that switches on caffeine-clearing enzymes, tied to how much coffee people actually drink.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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