Public Health Nutrition Editorial Highlight: ‘Associations between taste preferences and chronic diseases: a population-based exploratory study in China’ Authors: Hanqi Li, Peng Jia & Teng Fei discuss their research below.

Unhealthy diet is one of the most prevalent factors affecting the occurrence and development of chronic diseases in modern life. A large number of studies have analysed people’s eating and drinking behaviours, including the collocation of meat and vegetables, and the intake of dairy products, salt, and oil. However, studies on the relationships between taste preferences and chronic diseases have been extremely insufficient, which was mainly due to the scarcity of systematically collected databases on the taste.

Taste does matter. To date, there have been many cell biological studies on taste mechanisms demonstrating that taste has played an important role in human evolution. For instance, together with the smell, taste helps people evaluate the nutritional contents of foods; taste preferences may have specific correlations with nutritional deficiencies. When the body suffers from diseases or discomfort, the function of taste will be subject to interference, thereby affecting food intake of the body. An improved understanding of taste biology and genetics are of benefit to chronic disease prevention and intervention.

For the taste evaluation based on individuals is highly subjective, we try to establish the association between taste and diseases based on population, from a perspective of the spatial heterogeneity of taste preferences. In China, there are many cuisines with different taste characteristics. We have obtained 8,050 recipes of the 16 most common categories of the Chinese cuisines from an online cooking recipe website, and all seasonings of these recipes were labelled with one or more tastes or sensations, which are “sour”, “sweet”, “umami”, “salty”, “fat”, “spicy”, and “pungent”. The taste quantitative index for each cuisine was represented by the use frequency of the seven tastes. Furthermore, since cuisine preference varies among different provinces, with the help of points of interest data of restaurants throughout China, provincial dietary taste preferences were calculated quantitatively. Finally, Geodetector was introduced to explore the association between dietary taste preferences and the occurrence of chronic diseases.

In our results, 16 kinds of chronic diseases exhibited significant correlations with one or more tastes. “Salty” related to the most chronic diseases. And most chronic diseases had significant associations with only one taste. Whereas for a few chronic diseases, such as nasopharyngeal cancer, multiple tastes showed significant associations. Besides, compared with the effects of individual tastes, the interactions of tastes increased the risk of these 16 diseases and produced nonlinear enhancement outcomes.

It should be noted that the results of this study are data-driven. Due to the deficiency of the research on the relationship between chronic diseases and dietary tastes, only a part of the results can be related to existing researches. Although most findings have not yet been confirmed, the value of this research lies in presenting a quantitative research approach based on the crowdsourcing of data to explore potential health risk factors, which can be applied to the exploratory analysis of disease aetiology. And also, these exploratory findings provide basic data for scientific research in related fields and may point out new research directions.

The full article ‘Associations between taste preferences and chronic diseases: a population-based exploratory study in China’ published in Public Health Nutrition is available to download for free for a limited time.

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