7 . How does the woman want her meat cooked?

8 . People are motivated to try a vegetarian diet for different reasons-from religious beliefs to potential health and environmental benefits. But many people have a hard time sticking with it. In fact studies show many self-reported vegetarians actually do consume some animal products.

“A lot of people who want to be vegetarian are perhaps notable to.” says Dr. Nabeel Yassen of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “We wanted to know if genetics is part of the reason,” he says.

Yaseen and his colleagues compared the DNA of about 330,000 people, using data from the UK Biobank initiative The study included 5.324 vegetarians, who had not eaten any animal flesh or products obtained from animals for at least one year. They found 34 genes that may play a role in maintain a strict vegetarian diet. And they identified 3 genes that are more tightly linked to it.

“What we can say is that these genes have something to do with vegetarianism (素食主义),” Yaseen says. “Perhaps vegetarians have different variants (变体) of these genes that make them able to pursue a strict vegetarian diet,” he explains. The study is published in PLOS ONE, a science journal.

Of the three genes most strongly associated with vegetarianism, the authors say two of them have important functions in fat metabolism (新陈代谢). The study can’t answer exactly how genetic differences could shape or influence vegetarians, but Dr. Yaseen has some ideas. “One theory is that maybe there’s a fat nutrient, or nutrients, in meat that some people need and others don’t,” he says.

“Lots of factors influence what we eat, everything from our taste preferences, to our budgets to our culture. So, the idea that food choice is a so influenced by genetics is not surprising,” Yaseen says. “But this is just the first step,” he adds, “More research is needed to determine which genes and which variants maybe crucial.”

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