Europeans are world's most sugar-sensitive people

Sat, Jun 27

Washington, June 27 (ANI): Sweet-toothed Europeans now have another reason to gorge on a few more pieces of chocolate cake, for they are among the most sugar-sensitive people in the world, concludes a new genetic analysis.

People in the UK, France, Italy and Russia have a tandem of genetic variations in a sugar-sensing gene, which makes them detect trace levels of sweetness.

Dennis Drayna, a geneticist at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, said that all over the world, people living at northern latitudes carry these genetic variations at far higher frequencies than tropical-living peoples

For the study, the researchers presented 144 Europeans, Asians and Africans with nine solutions containing varying amounts of table sugar - sucrose - in amounts varying from 0 to 4 per cent.

Source:http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090627/1662/ttc-europeans-are-world-s-most-sugar-sen.html