Sunday, July 05, 2009

Now you have an excuse for that sweet tooth!

Sweet-toothed Brits have one less excuse for taking their morning tea with several spoons of sugar. They and other Europeans are among the most sugar-sensitive people in the world, a new genetic analysis concludes.

The vast majority of people in the UK, France, Italy and Russia boast a tandem of genetic variations in a sugar-sensing gene that allows them to detect trace levels of sweetness.

Around the world, populations that live at northern latitudes carry these genetic variations at far higher frequencies than tropical-living peoples, says Dennis Drayna, a geneticist at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland.

Posted via web from davidfrank's posterous

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