Heritability of diurnal changes in food intake in free-living humans

The time of day of meal ingestion, the number of people present at the meal, the subjective state of hunger, and the estimated before-meal contents in the stomach have been established as influences on the amount eaten in a meal, and this influence has been shown to be heritable. Because these factors intercorrelate, the possibility that the calculated heritabilities for some of these variables could result indirectly from their convariation with one of the other heritable variables was assessed.

The independence of the heritability of the influence of these four factors was investigated with 110 identical and 102 fraternal same-sex and 53 fraternal mixed-sex adult twin pairs who were paid to maintain 7-d food intake diaries. From the diary reports, the meal sizes were calculated and subjected to multiple regression analysis using the estimated before-meal stomach contents, the reported number of other people present, the subjective hunger ratings, and the time of day of the meal as predictors. Linear structural modeling was applied to the beta coefficients from the multiple regression to investigate whether the heritability of the influences of these four variables was independent.

Significant genetic effects were found for the beta coefficients for all four variables, indicating that the heritability of their relationship with intake is to some extent heritable.

These results suggest that the influences of multiple factors on intake are influenced by the genes and become part of the total package of genetically determined physiologic, sociocultural, and psychological processes that regulate energy balance.