Genetic differences in how people metabolise caffeine may influence how overweight they are, but this doesn’t mean drinking more coffee will make you slimmer
By Clare Wilson
15 March 2023
Genetic differences mean some people metabolise caffeine more quickly than others
ary Burchell/10’000 Hours/Getty Images
Genetic evidence indicates that higher levels of caffeine in a person’s blood may be linked with lower weight.
But people shouldn’t assume that drinking more coffee will be a route to weight loss, says Dipender Gill at Imperial College London, who helped carry out the study.
Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance, with many people consuming several beverages of coffee or caffeinated soft drinks a day.
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Numerous studies have previously suggested that caffeine consumption is linked with lower weight. But these were mainly observational studies, which recorded people’s health and their caffeine consumption, making it hard to know if caffeine caused the effects or just correlated with them.
Gill’s team used an alternative approach, looking at genetic differences in how quickly people break down caffeine to mimic the effects of giving different doses in a randomised trial.
There are two genes that affect people’s ability to break down caffeine, meaning that after consuming the same amount of it, people with different variants would have different levels of it in their blood.