NEW YORK, Oct 12 — Numerous chefs are successfully serving up meat-free dishes without sacrificing flavour. But switching to a vegetarian diet doesn’t come easy to everyone. In fact, scientists suggest that our genetic makeup could play a role in our ability to forego meat.

On a global scale, it is estimated that the food system is responsible for 27 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. This environmental reality is unlikely to improve if the OECD’s projections materialise. In a report describing the outlook for agriculture between 2021 and 2030, the European economic research organisation estimates that meat consumption is set to increase by 14 per cent, which will inevitably lead to the expansion of agricultural crops to 4 per cent more land. Yet the production of meat, dairy products and all the crops needed to feed livestock already monopolise 80 per cent of the Earth’s agricultural land.

All of which might inspire you to try switching to a vegetarian diet, but that’s easier said than done for some people, scientists say, and the reason could lie in their genetic makeup. In research recently published in the journal Plos One, US and UK scientists explain that "these results support a role for genetics in choosing a vegetarian diet and open the door to future studies aimed at further elucidating the physiologic pathways involved in vegetarianism.”

One of the study authors, Dr. Nabeel Yaseen, professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, explains in a statement that "while religious and moral considerations certainly play a major role in the motivation to adopt a vegetarian diet, our data suggest that the ability to adhere to such a diet is constrained by genetics.”

And it could all be to do with lipids, the researchers suggest, with some people potentially unable to do without certain components found in lipids from meat. The researchers identified several genes as being associated with vegetarianism, including some involved in lipid metabolism and others involved in brain function. "One area in which plant products differ from meat is complex lipids,” the researcher explains. "My speculation is there may be lipid component(s) present in meat that some people need. And maybe people whose genetics favour vegetarianism are able to synthesise these components endogenously. However, at this time, this is mere speculation and much more work needs to be done to understand the physiology of vegetarianism.”

To reach these conclusions, the genetic data of 5,324 strict vegetarians, eating no fish, poultry or red meat, were compared with 329,455 meat-eating control subjects. The composition of meals eaten between 2006 and 2019 was analysed to provide as many elements of comparison as possible.

Note that this is not the first time that a potential link between genetics and food preferences has been established. Previous research, published in the journal Nature, sheds some light on why certain people dislike coriander. Two genes were identified, one related to odour appreciation and the other responsible for the link between taste and smell. — ETX Studio