Investigation of the link between PROP taste perception and vegetables consumption using FAOSTAT data

Abstract

In this work we investigated, in populations located in Central Asia, the relationship between PROP taste perception and vegetables liking and consumption using FAOSTAT dataset. Collected data were analysed using distance matrices, Mantel test and Pearson correlation. Populations showing similar ability in tasting PROP bitterness are more similar as respect to vegetable consumption (r = 0.63, p-value = .05). Moreover, a significant negative correlation was found between the percentage of Non Taster (NT) in different countries and the percentage of vegetable consumption (r = −0.87, p-value = .02), while a significant positive correlation emerged between the percentage of Super Taster (ST) and the percentage of vegetable liking (r = 0.87, p-value = .02). In our work we showed that differences in bitter perception among populations contributes to differences in vegetable liking and vegetable consumption. More in detail, populations with higher percentage of ST consume more vegetables than population where the majority of individuals are NT.

Keywords:

• Vegetable consumptions
• PROP status
• vegetable liking
• TAS2R38 gene
• Silk Road

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the IRCCS Burlo Garofolo of Trieste (5X1000 funding).